I currently have my web application hosted on AWS, and I use two ELB instances, one to load balance the frontend requests to the app servers, and a second to load balance the backend requests FROM the app servers TO the API servers, like so (sorry for the crappy ascii diagram):
/-->APP1--\ /-->API1
User-->ELB1 ELB2
\-->APP2--/ \-->API2
In other words, the API requests that the APP servers make are load balanced evenly across the two backend API servers.
But, because I'm caching responses on the API servers, and use a cache invalidation mechanism which is NOT shared between the API servers, I'd like for a user's session to be stuck to one backend API server.
I already have the user's session stuck to one APP server, using the normal ELB load balancer-generated cookie stickiness, but is there any way to get the backend ELB stuck to a session? Of course, those requests are not coming from a browser, so there's nothing to manage cookies, and it seems that ELB's can only manage stickiness with cookies. Can I emulate the necessary cookies my backend requests?
To close off this question, yes, this is fairly easy to achieve by simply capturing the 'Set-Cookie' response header from the ELB, and then passing the cookie back in subsequent requests. But, see my caveat below.