As promised in our last newsletter, we have a load balancer, otherwise known as a Web Farm now up and serving your requests to two different back end servers now. They've been up and running since Sunday evening (2/12) at about 8:00.

Here's how it works: we have two servers now serving up requests to everybody, including Bellevue. We'll call them joshua and caleb . You might click a link to view a member named Abraham and that would be served up by joshua , then your next click might be to see his wife Sarah and that might be served up by caleb . But you'll never know it; they are chosen at random and it will just work seamlessly, and hopefully really fast too.

This was a huge step in our ability to gitem BVCMS into the future. Now, adding more churches will never be a problem, we'll be able to scale out easy as 3,4,5. That was one big step to get from 1 to 2 however; we had to change all sorts of things and the way they work under the covers. The basics are that there can be no operation that has dependencies on the state of a single web server; everything must come from either the database or another central resource.

This change will also make it safer to publish changes during the middle of the day. We'll be able to bring joshua offline to publish new changes while caleb continues to respond to requests. Then reverse that to get caleb updated.