Development versus Production Environments
In most cases, you need separate services for your development and production environments. Isolating your development environment from your production applications helps provide application stability and security to your end users, while providing flexibility and freedom to your application developers.
Development Services
A development environment can typically be provided by a one- . A single server generally simplifies debugging and enables testing of most application features (other than performance). The developer is free to start and stop the server as needed. You might want to create a separate service for each developer to allow independent updates to the application under development.
Launch services were recommended for development on previous releases of SAS/IntrNet software. This was because the Version 6 SCL-based was not tolerant of some common development errors (such as mismatched quotation marks in SAS code). Later releases of the Application Server are much more tolerant of these types of errors. Most programming errors cause the individual request to fail without affecting the server.
Production Services
Most production applications can be deployed on a socket service with one or more servers. Additional servers can be added as the total system load grows. Servers can easily be distributed across multiple server systems. Once your service uses more than one server, you should consider using the Application Load Manager. The Load Manager provides intelligent load balancing between multiple servers in a socket service.
Applications with widely varying user loads or special security requirements might benefit from pool services. Pool services enable servers to be started and stopped dynamically as the user load grows and shrinks.