serverconnected

SERVERCONNECTED is a term used to describe an approach and, in some contexts, a set of software artifacts designed to maintain robust connectivity between servers and between clients and servers in distributed systems. The concept emphasizes persistent, low-latency connections, automatic reconnection, and transparent failover to support continuous data flow.

Core components typically associated with SERVERCONNECTED include a connection manager, a session layer, transport protocol adapters, and a policy engine. The connection manager handles connection lifecycles, backoff strategies, and health checks. The session layer preserves stateful sessions across reconnections. Protocol adapters support transports such as TCP, UDP, and WebSocket, with options for gRPC, MQTT, or other binary or text-based protocols. The policy engine enforces quality of service, rate limiting, and security policies to balance performance and reliability.

Security and reliability are central to SERVERCONNECTED concepts. Typical features include support for TLS with mutual authentication (mTLS), token-based authentication, rotated credentials, end-to-end encryption, message integrity checks, and protection against replay. Reliability mechanisms may include automatic reconnect, local buffering, and idempotent processing at the application layer. Design for scalability often employs stateless frontends, partitioned backends, horizontal scaling, load balancing, and service discovery to manage increasing demand.

Use cases span real-time collaboration and gaming, financial market data feeds, Internet of Things gateway systems, microservices communication, and edge computing environments, where persistent connectivity and rapid failover are beneficial.

History and status: as of the mid-2020s, SERVERCONNECTED is not a single formal standard but a descriptive term applied by various vendors and projects to similar connectivity goals. There is no universally accepted canonical implementation, and implementations vary in protocol choices and feature sets.