We have Java Enterprise applications deployed on to multiple servers. There are replicated servers running same application to load-balance(let's call them J2EE servers).Note that this is not clustered.
There is a common server (let's call it props server) which hosts all properties files relevant to all applications. The folder containing properties files is NFS shared between all the other J2EE servers. The issue is that you can see props server is a single point of failure. If it did not come up or if the NFS share gets corrupted, other servers wont be able to load properties.
What are the options to avoid this hard dependency ? Given the constraint that we do not want to duplicate property files to all servers.
Given the constraint that we do not want to duplicate property files to all servers.
If you are ok to copy properties to some servers, elect a leader and make sure any modification is propagated to backups, then Paxos is your friend. If the leader fails, a new leader can be elected. I have updated the wikipedia page. It contained errors regarding the description of the algorithm.