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Blog : Apache Tomcat Support Options: Part One

posted by avanabs on April 7, 2010 07:43 AM

One area that is getting a lot of attention in these days of "do more with less" is the cost of infrastructure maintenance. Many studies show that maintaining software is much more expensive over it's life cycle than purchasing/building it in the first place, so IT management is looking at these costs with renewed interest. The issue turns out to be a bit more complex than it originally appears, although one thing that leaps out is that all of the options for supporting Tomcat are far better than the options we all had with commercial JEE Application Servers. First, let's look at what we mean by "support". In this series of blogs, I'll be sharing some thoughts about the various supportions available for Tomcat, as well as contrasting those with the JEE commercial Application Server support situation.

Enterprise Application Server Support

While it is theoretically possible to forgo support entirely, and sometimes this is forced by software vendor failure or acquisition/product retirement, realistically IT organizations require ongoing support for their mission critical infrastructure. In this post, we will be discussing the various options available to IT organizations for supporting Tomcat environments. We will also be discussing the important differences between commercial proprietary closed source vendor JEE application server support and Apache Tomcat.

One of the most important and valuable “features” of Tomcat from the IT Operations point of view is support choice. Proprietary software can only be supported by the vendor, at that vendor’s monopolistic support pricing, while using Tomcat provides multiple viable options in a competitive support environment. Hardly surprisingly, excellent Tomcat support can therefore be obtained at much lower cost. That said, while Tomcat itself is “free”, there are real internal and external costs associated with using Tomcat as an IT infrastructure. It is important to understand these costs when comparing the various support options.