Percussion provides the functionality of a 3-tier publishing architecture without the additional overhead of 3 separate servers due to the nature of the product. The Percussion CMS server acts as both the authoring tier as well as the "staging" tier. The Percussion CMS provides a WYSYWIG experience for authoring as well as a preview service that allows you to view the site as it would appear in production.
Once content is created and approved, it can then be published to a production web server. When Percussion publishes it does two things. 1) It assembles static HTML pages that are published to the web server. 2) It updates meta-data in the Delivery Tier Server (DTS) database that is used to power dynamic functionality on the website.
Although Percussion does not provide or act as the production web server, there are a number of recommended web server configurations provide here:
- Publish to a web server running a standalone DTS Tomcat
- Publish to a web server running an IIS 7 frontend and a DTS Tomcat backend
- Publish to a web server running an Apache HTTPD frontend and a DTS Tomcat backend
In all of these circumstances the Percussion DTS is co-located with the web server as in this diagram:
Additional Considerations
Load balancing configurations are independent of Percussion. Using a 3rd party tool, files can be synchronized between multiple load balanced Production servers.