Front end server

The front end server main responsibility is to provide output for web clients and web services.

Two roles are required to accomplish this:

  • The Web role service allows executing web requests for the web client, and web service requests.
  • The Full text indexing role provides crawling and indexing functionality for the SolrLucene search engine.

The front end server is the public facing server handling all interactive web requests. The Web role exposes public endpoints through the Internet Information Services, which is the default web engine on a Microsoft Windows Server operating system. All the endpoints are secured with secure sockets layer (SSL) to provide the https schema. Depending on the expected accessibility towards the endpoints between intranet and internet, the certificate has to be configured accordingly.

The certificate's subject name must match the hostname for the endpoints that the clients will be using. For example, if the web client is provided an endpoint like https://front.ish.example.com/ISHCM/ (where ish refers to an example related to Content Manager, and front specifies it further as a front end server) or the web service client targets an endpoint like https://front.ish.example.com/ISHWS/Wcf/API25/Application.svc, then the hostname is front.ish.example.com. This must match the SSL certificate's subject name. Depending on the scenario, the front.ish.example.com should or should not match the server's fully qualified domain name.