Offloading application components to edge servers

Abstract

An apparatus and method for off-loading application components to edge servers are provided. An application is made edge-aware by defining which components of the application may be run from an edge server, and which components cannot be run from an edge server. When a request is received that is to be processed by an application on an origin server, a determination is made as to whether the application contains edgable components. If so, an edgified version of the application is created. When a request is received that is handled by a component that may be run on the edge server, the request is handled by that component on the edge server. When a request is received that is handled by a component that is not edgable, the request is passed to a proxy agent which then provides the request to a broker agent on the origin server.

Description

RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is related to commonly assigned and co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. __________ (Attorney Docket No. RSW92001O141US1) entitled ‘Method and Apparatus for Minimizing Inconsistency Between Data Sources in a Web Content Distribution System’, filed on Sep. 21, 2001 and U.S. Patent Application Serial No. ___________ (Attorney Docket No. RSW92001O142US1) entitled ‘Method and Apparatus for Caching Subscribed and Non-Subscribed Content in a Network Data Processing System’, filed on Sep. 21, 2001, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. ___________ (Attorney Docket No. RSW920010126) entitled ‘Addressing the Name Space Mismatch Between Content Servers and Content Caching Systems’, filed on Sep. 27, 2001, all of which are hereby incorporated by reference.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Technical Field[0003]The present invention is directed to an apparatus and method for offloading application components to edge servers. More specifically, t...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0012]When a request is received that is handled by a component that may be run on the edge server, the request is handled by that component on the edge server. When a request is received that is handled by a component that is not edgable, the request is passed to a proxy agent which then provides the request to a broker agent on the origin server. The broker agent then replicates the request and forwards it to an appropriate component of the origin server application. In this way, the performance of the application may be improved by off-loading processing performed by edgable components to an edge server which is closer to the client device than the origin server. Other features and advantages of the present invention will be described in, or will become apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art in view of, the following detailed description of the preferred embodiments.

Problems solved by technology

The current state of the art limits the use of proxy caching, however, to static or infrequently changing content, such as the Web pages previously mentioned.

There is very limited ability to cache dynamically changing content on a proxy.

Since most applications are developed with the assumption that they will run on a single server, there is not much support provided for distributing them.

As a result, the current state of the art can not support running components of an application written to traditional programming models at a proxy server.

Images