Content management on server farm with layer-7 routing

Service replication on a server farm is becoming increasingly widespread as the explosive growth of the Web is straining the architecture of many Internet sites. Layer-7 routing, routing packets based on requested content, has been recognized as a powerful approach to distribute workload among these server farms. However, little attention has been given to how to configure content-related knowledge into the layer-7 routing mechanisms. In addition, the used data structures for storing content-related knowledge and lookup operation for making routing decisions are also unclear. This paper presents a management system that can support a configurable and high-performance server farm with layer-7 routing. In this system, we devised a data structure termed URL table to hold content-related information for making content-aware routing decisions. We also propose a novel idea termed "URL Formalization", which provide a scalable solution to speedup the content-aware request routing.