Distributed web services?

I'm wondering, is it possible to have many servers with the same web service deployed and then put them to communicate together?

Can you make a distributed system (having transparency, being failsafe and su开发者_如何学运维ch things) on top of web services, instead of TCP?

Is this a poor idea?

This is very possible to do. You can either purchase a hardware load balancer that will direct traffic to one of its configured host or, if you are on Windows, you can use Network Load Balancing.

There are many hardware load balancers on the market, the one I have used and have been pleased with is made by Coyote Point: http://www.coyotepoint.com/

It's not a poor idea, and is a commonly used to distribute traffic.