Item: Apache Tomcat
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Tomcat is being used as an application server across the organization. Most of our backend web applications and RESTful APIs run on Tomcat platform. Tomcat is baked into the AMI that is created for AWS and our web applications are pushed into the AMIs using Chef scripts. Then the tomcat server is brought up and applications are deployed.

Pros and Cons

Tomcat is used for writing backend web applications in Java, Spring etc.
They are also used to host our APIs. Our Spring or RestEasy API frameworks run are used to build APIs and Tomcat is the application server where they are hosted.

Tomcat is a fairly stable and lightweight application server and it being open source lot of organizations are using it to host their applications.
I have seen the use of Tomcat decline in recent years because of serverless technical platforms like Lambdas on AWS. Also Spring Boot and Jetty servers can run web applications/APIs by bringing container bundled into the app and without a need for separate server deployment and management. Same is the case with Spring boot, though in Spring Boot you could use embedded Tomcat too. But I have seen developers using Jetty more.

Return on Investment

Apache Tomcat is a very stable, lightweight App server that is open source and free to use in an enterprise. Many banks and other product companies use it for their open source web/API development.
I cannot see any negative ROI for Apache Tomcat. Developers and users are easy to get and most of the candidates i see during interviews have experience in Tomcat.

Alternatives Considered

As I have described before, Tomcat has competition from Jetty & frameworks like Netty.
Also with NodeJs, lot of web application server side development and API development is beign done using javascript & Nodejs. So there is some decline in the use of Apache Tomcat. Though it is still very well placed in the java community.

Other Software Used

Splunk Enterprise, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Redis, AWS Lambda

Likelihood to Recommend

Anywhere where you need HTTP thread handling like a web application or restful APIs, Tomcat would be a good option. Each individual instance of Tomcat can handle tens of thousands of requests per second (depending on your web infra and request/response latency).
However new embedded servers like Jetty are being widely adopted. Another embedded server framework - Netty, is being used to develop servlet containers by developers for event based microservices.

Stable, Lightweight HTTP servlet container for Web Apps and APIs

Overall Satisfaction with Apache Tomcat