Load balance IIS sub applications

Hi!

I'm trying to figure out a good solution for load balancing an IIS hosted application.

The application layer is pretty straight forward, but there's also a stateless service layer that has multiple sub applications.

Basically under the site in IIS for the service layer, there's /service1, /service2, /service3 etc. Each configured as an application.

Right now there's about 30 such sub applications, which will increase to around 90 when new functionality is added.

A requirement is to load balance each of these URIs, or sub applications, individually.

An optional, but highly preferable, requirement is that the application managers would like be able to add and remove sub applications to the load balancing by some simple method.

I imagine I need an iRule to select pool based on URI. Something like this.

when HTTP_REQUEST {
  set poolnameprefix "application_"
   set uripath [URI::path [HTTP::uri]] 
   set uripath [string trimleft $uripath /]
   set fields [split $uripath "/"]
   set poolname "$poolnameprefix[lindex $fields 0]"

   if { [catch { pool $poolname } ] } {
      pool "application_default"
   }
   
   unset poolnameprefix
   unset uripath
   unset fields
   unset poolname
}

What would be a good way to take care of the pools?

I could create them manually for each sub application, but that would require me to keep maintaining the pools and monitors.

Is an iApp or iControl the only way to go to get the app managers to be able to maintain the sub applications? Or is there some other way to handle this?

Thanks!

/Andreas