Chapter 18. Security, Load Balancing, Failover, and Other Considerations

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IN THIS CHAPTER

• Security, Part 1

• Integrating with Apache

• Load Balancing

• Writing Applications for Multimachine Service

• The Failover Fallacy

• Database Tuning

• Security, Part 2 (SSL)

• The End of the Book

Getting your site up and running, code-wise, is usually only 3/4 of the battle. Just because you can make it jump through hoops on your local workstation doesn't mean that it's going to make the grade when you deploy it on your big Sun 9999 MegaServer at your hosting facility.

This chapter is about all the other tasks that you end up having to think about when you deploy a Web site: security, performance, and reliability.

Some of this is better left to an expert. If you're going to need to use public-key infrastructure (PKI) security beyond the level of simple Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption, you are better off hiring a PKI guru. Similarly, if you deploy using Oracle, hiring an Oracle guru to tune your database is a reasonable investment.

However, as in most things in the industry, it pays to at least know enough to be dangerous about all of these topics.

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