Highly-Available (HA) VertiGIS Studio Web

There's been recent discussion around HA use of VSW and the VertiGIS team felt it worthwhile to expand on an earlier post. Many larger customers request High Availability (HA) use in a production environment, often in conjunction with a HA deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise or ArcGIS Portal for all tiers. So, how does one set up HA for use with VertiGIS Studio Web (VSW)?   

It's worth noting that VSW and VSW Designer are 100% static content, meaning that content is downloaded and then everything happens directly on the client machine in the web browser. There is no 'server side' component to VSW. This means:

• There is zero benefit in separating the authoring static content from the web static content
• If you want to build a redundant system, you should use standard patterns for ‘web server’ redundancy.
• In VertiGIS SaaS environment, we don’t use a web server at all, we use a CDN (content delivery network) since it is designed for just that purpose. 
• For customers who elect to install VSW for on-premise licensing and use, the web server deployment is the pattern to use. 

 The most common patterns for web server deployment (according to ChatGPT) are:

Setting up redundant or fail-safe web servers serving static content involves several common patterns to ensure high availability and reliability. Here are some standard approaches:

1. Load Balancing: Use a load balancer to distribute incoming traffic across multiple web servers. This helps in handling high traffic loads and provides redundancy in case one server fails.
2. Multiple Server Instances: Run multiple instances of your web server software on different physical or virtual servers. Each instance serves the same content, providing redundancy in case one instance fails.
3. Failover Clustering: Set up a failover cluster of web servers, where one server takes over the workload of another server if it fails. This ensures uninterrupted service in case of a failure.
4. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs): Use a CDN to cache and serve static content from edge servers located closer to the end-users. This can improve performance and provide redundancy by distributing content across multiple servers.

Any quesitons, please let us know.