Load Balancer Configuration Tip When Using Oracle Payments for Authorization Processing Only (Doc ID 787966.1)

Last updated on JULY 23, 2024

Applies to:

Goal

In this scenario, Oracle Payments is used for processing Authorizations only (i.e. no settlement activity is required).

Is there a recommended way of setting up load balancing when there are multiple middle tiers with Oracle Payments configured on all of them?

Lets say there are 3 middle tiers:
mt1.oracle.com
mt2.oracle.com
mt3.oracle.com

Also, there is a load balancer (LB) for those middle tiers:
LB.oracle.com

What happens if we set the profile option "IBY: ECAPP URL" and the payments parameter "Transmission Servlet Base URL" to the load balancer URL (i.e. http://LB.oracle.com:8000)?

With this setup, when making a payment call (i.e. Authorization Request) from a calling application (i.e. Oracle Receivables or Order Management invoking an IBY API through PL/SQL), the following will happen:

•  The request will be routed to the EC Servlet running at http://LB.oracle.com:8000/OA_HTML/ibyecapp (as indicated in profile option "IBY: ECAPP URL").
•  Then, the Load Balancer will route this request to one of the 3 middle tier servers.

Hence, http://LB.oracle.com:8000/OA_HTML/ibyecapp will be translated to:

• http://mt1.oracle.com:8000/OA_HTML/ibyecapp

OR...

• http://mt2.oracle.com:8000/OA_HTML/ibyecapp

OR...

• http://mt3.oracle.com:8000/OA_HTML/ibyecapp

In other words, this could be either MT 1 or 2 or 3 depending on the LB routing.

Lets say LB re-directed the request to: http://mt1.oracle.com:8000/OA_HTML/ibyecapp

The Payments engine (i.e. ibyecapp) on MT1 will process the request and prepare a call to the servlet base url (i.e. location of the third party payment system servlet, ormaipp_xxx)
This call will be placed to the LB URL: http://LB.oracle.com:8000/oa_servlets/oramipp_xxx (as indicated in the payments parameter "Transmission Servlet Base URL").

Now the Load Balancer (LB) can potentially re-direct the request again to either MT1, 2 or 3!

Therefore we are making 2 hops over the load balancer for each payment request: first hop to ibyecapp and second hop to oramipp_xxx.

A visual representation of the connection sequence under this configuration is provided in the following graph:

 How can we avoid this second hop to the Load Balancer when processing Authorization requests?

Solution

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