IntroductionDatacap Web Services (wTM) can be deployed in Azure, leveraging features which are native to Azure such as:
- Azure VM Scale Sets
- Azure SQL
- Azure Application Gateway
The Business Problem
A customer receives unstructured documents from a variety of sources. Some of these documents contain data which would traditionally have been surfaced using a Datacap application. The requirement was to provide an architecture which could be horizontally scaled out when demand increased and scaled back in when demand decreased. A traditional Datacap application requires Rulerunner Servers to process batches and Datacap Rulerunner does not easily lend itself to load balancing or to dynamic horizontal scaling. It is possible to use the Datacap REST API to create transactions which execute some Datacap Rulesets on the documents and return the data. Datacap Web Servers can be load-balanced and can therefore be scaled horizontally.
Corresponding White PaperMore detail about the solution is available in the corresponding White Paper, which can be found on the IBM Community
here.
The Logical Architecture
The solution logical architecture consists of a Datacap Taskmaster Server, a single Datacap Web Server which was deployed inside an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS), an Azure Application Gateway which provides load balancing capabilities, an Azure SQL Database to host the Datacap application's Admin Database and an instance of Azure Active Directory Services. SoapUI was used to exercise the Web Services Endpoints.
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