2 separate AEM instances under same sub domain?

I have 2 geographically separately hosted AEM (adobe experience manager) instances under the same TLD but with separate sub domains.

For example www.foo.com (instance 1) and www2.foo.com (instance 2)

Is it possible to have both these AEM instances appear under the same TLD? For example something like :

www.foo.com/instance1/ and www.foo.com/instance2/

Any help appreciated!

Solution

Yes, this sort of thing is done often using network tools. Typically a website that is built to handle a load will have some sort of load balancer in front of it. The load balancer would sit even ahead of the dispatchers in the overall flow. With a load balancer you can specify routing rules (such as an irule with an F5 load balancer) that will cause the load balancer to send traffic to different places based on the rules you set up--such as the differences in the initial folder structure of the URLs. Check out some articles on irules for more background, such as https://devcentral.f5.com/articles/the101-irules-ndash-introduction-to-irules.

The same can also be done via content delivery networks (CDNs). Ultimately, what you are looking to do must be done at some network layer before the request actually hits an AEM server. The AEM instances themselves won't know that other instances exist. They will just respond to the requests that reach them, and it will be up to the routing layers in the network upstream from them to determine which HTTP requests go to which AEM servers.