Considering a three-tier app ( web server, app server and database).
[Apache Web server -> Tomcat app server -> database]
How to build an app stack (leaving out the database part) that has no single point of failure and is fault tolerant ?
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IMHO, this is quite an open-ended question. How specific is a single point of failure - single app server, single physical server, single data centre, network?
A starting point would be to run your Tomcat and Apache servers in clusters. Alternatively, you can run separate instances, fronted with a load balancer such as HAProxy - except, to avoid a single point of failure, you will need redundancy on the load balancer as well. I recently worked on a project where we had two instances of a load balancer, fronted with a virtual IP (VIP). The load balancers communicated with two different app server instances, using a round-robin approach. Clients connected to the VIP in order to use the application, and they were completely oblivious to the fact that there were multiple servers behind it.
As an additional comment, you may also want to look at space-based architecture - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space-based_architecture.
Riaan Nel
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