Microservices : Embedded tomcat vs standalone tomcat : Difference

Question

Can embedded tomcat or any such embedded server be used for microservices in production environment? How, embedded server is different wrt the normal standalone full fledged server (performance . reliability wise)? Is the embedded server light weight compared to standalone? What are the features that embeded servers do not have compared to their standalone ones? Can we change the default security settings, tls ciphers etc advanced things in embedded tomcat?

Cassady

On the one hand tomcat is lightweight, on the other hand every embedded tomcat need to load once again – Vesper

Answer 1

Well, it's a matter of choice. I've seen some services which use embedded tomcat in production and some services which rely on standalone tomcat container which is directly provided by the platform. Some platforms might not have a java runtime, in such scenarios you're bound to use embedded containers for tomcat or jetty. The key difference would be that standalone containers can host multiple java deployments whereas for single deployments you can stick to the embedded ones. And yeah reliability and performance won't be a huge concern, although I believe that standalone containers are designed to be more scalable. From my personal experience, embedded deployments are easier to manage, since we can custom configure the tomcat setting specific to that deployment (might be the answer to your last question)

Seldon