Load Balancing Web Services with WebSEAL
I came across this bit of information from an old email from several years ago, and wanted to capture it here for future reference. In case you're thinking of using a WebSEAL server as a proxy for a web service based application (SOAP or REST), there are some details you need to be aware of in how you tune your servers for a successful implementation. The advantage to using a WebSEAL server for proxying web service traffic is that you can enforce authorization based on the client ip address (typically a client web application). This isn't as strong of security as performing authenitcation and authorization using WS-Security or SAML, but if these options aren't available, WebSEAL can increase the security by only allowing certain ip addresses to access the application using POPs (Protected Object Policies). What you have to be aware of is the fact that the client opening the connection to the WebSEAL server is typically another application. This creates a problem if th...