Connections pooling REST calls made from Bluemix nodejs apps in to DataCenter services via Datapower

Question

Hi We have a UI component deployed to Bluemix on Noedjs which makes REST service calls (JSON/XML) to services deployed in Data-center. These calls will go through the IBM Data Power gateway as a security proxy.
Data Power establishes an HTTPS Mutual Authentication connection (using certs that are exchanged offline) to the caller. Although this method is secure it is time consuming to set up and if this connection is in setup for each service request it will create a slow response for the end user. To optimize response time we are looking for any solution which can pool connections between nodejs app deployed on Bluemix and DataPower security proxy. Any one has any experience in this area?

Answer 1

1. In regards to "it is time-consuming to set up", in datapower you can create a multi-protocol gateway (MPGW) in front of your services to act as router. The MPGW will match services calls based on their URI and route them accordingly. In this scenario, you will only need to configure a single endpoint in the Bluemix Cloud Integration service in order to work with all your services. One downside to this approach is that it will be harder to control access to specific on-premise services because they will all be exposed to your Bluemix app as a single service.

2. In regards to optimizing response times, where are you seeing the bottleneck? If the establishment of the tcp connections is causing too much overhead, you should be able to configure your Node.js app to use or re-use persistent connections via keepalive settings or you can look into setting up a connection pool that manages that for you (e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/generic-pool seems a popular choice). On the datapower side, make sure the front/back persistent timeout is set according to your requirements:http://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SS9H2Y_7.2.0/com.ibm.dp.doc/mpgw_availableproperties_serviceview.html?lang=en

Other timeout values in datapower can be found at http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21469404