We've been discussing the various support options, including community support, available for Apache Tomcat, and contrasting those to Commercial JEE Application Server Support options. In this final blog in the series, we're focusing on the remaining two Tomcat Options, Self Support and Vendor Support agreements.
Tomcat Self Support
The second option is supporting Tomcat within the IT organization. In this case, the IT organization must have significant Tomcat expertise on staff and they provide much/all of the support to the various users within the organization. Both the level of expertise required and the challenges of providing that for 24x7x365 mission critical applications are neither simple nor inexpensive.
Less understood is that server infrastructure software is inherently different from application software. It’s a specialty within the software industry; relatively few programmers have the skills and expertise to deal with the kinds of problems found within operating systems and application containers. Realistically, it takes a substantial scale of operations to make this option viable, but for very large organizations, the cost savings and ability to control the process may make self support worthwhile.
