Ports for client applications

This section provides a general description of how client applications and other server applications connect to the grid through ports. More specific descriptions of this are in the installation guides for each application that needs to connect to the grid. Use this description to identify the correct ports for client applications to use to connect to the grid.

Grid applications do not normally expose ports themselves. Clients connect to ports opened in one of the grid routers. This is an important concept that enables grid applications to be moved between hosts and scaled out without confusing the connected clients.

It is possible for applications to bypass the routers and open ports themselves. However, they rarely do and, if they do, the correct way of configuring that application is described in the application's documentation. In that case, what is written here does not apply.

The routers may expose ports of different types:

• Proxy - Access to the internal Grid communication protocol.
• HTTPS - Access to web applications, web services, and REST.
• Connection Dispatchers - Ports opened on behalf of grid applications with proprietary communication configured per application.

Technically, routers are application neutral. A client may connect to any router in a grid as long as that router exposes the correct type of port on a network interface that is accessible from the client. So, given that an application client needs a particular type of port, it is possible to select any such port as long as the client can reach it. However, this should be described in the documentation of the client application.