Tomcat is an open-source web server supported by Apache.
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Azure Pipelines
Score 7.8 out of 10
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Users can automate builds and deployments with Azure Pipelines. Build, test, and deploy Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android, and iOS apps. Run in parallel on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Azure Pipelines can be purchased standalone, but it is also part of Azure DevOps Services agile development planning and CI/CD suite.
Excellent value for companies wishing to host Java applications in the cloud. Utilizing hosting tools such as load balancers and network and application firewalls, Tomcat can be part of a powerful system to host web applications to thousands of users. There has been consistency in the development and support of Tomcat since its initial release in the late '90s and the best commonalities have been carried forward. If you host Java web applications, Tomcat is as good as any for an application server.
With a fully Microsoft Azure based workflow - Azure Pipelines makes absolute sense. Azure Pipelines are robust and work very well with SonarQube for test coverage and are shared with our developers. This prevents the developers for pushing code without unit tests across our backend and frontend platforms. We have reduced our instances of manual regression tests especially when there are multiple teams working across the same repositories.
Using tomcat manager to troubleshoot is not very informative. Error messages are vague, you have to dig into log files for more information about the problems.
Is great for simple web applications, but may not work for heavy development which may require a full J2EE stack, might like JBoss better.
Security in tomcat is not straightforward, as I discovered that you have to understand how to set up realms in tomcat in order to hash passwords, which I was not overly familiar with, which is a big deal when setting up users in the tomcat-users.xml file.
Tomcat has a very rich API set which allows us to implement our automation script to trigger the deployment, configure, stop and start Tomcat from the command line. In our projects, we embedded Tomcat in our Eclipse in all of the developer's machines so they could quickly verify their code with little effort, Azure Webapp has strong support for Tomcat so we could move our application to Azure cloud very easy. One drawback is Tomcat UI quite poorly features but we almost do not use it.
Tomcat doesn't have a built-in watchdog that ensures restart upon failure, so you have to provide it externally. A very good solution is java service wrapper. The community edition is able to restart Tomcat upon out of memories exceptions.
Tomcat support to customize memory used and allow us to define the Connection pool and thread pool to increase system performance and availability, Tomcat server itself consume very little memory and almost no footprint. We use Tomcat in our production environment which has up to thousands of concurrent users and it is stable and provides a quick response.
Eclipse Jetty is the best alternative for Apache Tomcat because which is also an open-source and lightweight servlet container like Tomcat. A major advantage of this over Tomcat is that Jetty server can easily be embedded with the source code of web applications. Since it requires less memory to operate, you may realize that it is very efficient.
The tools are very similar - but Azure Pipelines work best for Azure-based products are better suited for the stack. For our engineers, we could switch between all the various continuous integration/deployment tools without much issues, but it makes sense to use the stack recommended by Azure. Our team has the relevant support licences to get support from Microsoft for all our products.
Tomcat is cheap and very quick to deploy, so it has benefited much when situation needs applications to be deployed quickly without wasting time on licensing and installations.
Plenty of documentation available so no vendor training is required. Support contract is not needed as well.
