A book about the history of web architecture
Building the Web
Ideas that built the modern web.
The internet didn’t emerge from a single grand vision. It was the cumulative result of people bumping into constraints and engineering solutions. Some of those solutions turned out to be particularly load-bearing: concepts so fundamental that we take them for granted today.
Building the Web is about those ideas and how they evolved. Each chapter starts with a real constraint that engineers faced, traces the solution they invented, and follows that idea as it scaled, sometimes beyond anything its creators imagined.
From load balancers to caching layers, from CGI scripts to content delivery networks - these are the building blocks that turned a research network into the infrastructure that runs the modern world. This is the story of how they got here.
This book is a work-in-progress. As chapters are published and ready for review, they will appear here. You can subscribe to the RSS feed or Sign up for Updates over email to be notified when there is new content.
Chapters
The Static Web
HTTP, httpd, and the simplest possible architecture that started everything.
Coming soonDynamic Content
CGI, mod_perl, and the invention of the application server - how the web learned to compute.
Coming soonLoad Balancing and Proxies
What happens when one machine isn't enough, and the abstraction that solved it.
Coming soonState and Sessions
Cookies, databases, and how a stateless protocol learned to remember.
Coming soonScaling Databases
Replication, read replicas, sharding, and the strategies that kept relational databases running as the web grew.
Coming soonCaching
Browser caches, reverse proxies, memcached, and the surprising difficulty of not computing the same thing twice.
Coming soonCDNs and the Edge
The problem of distance, the speed of light, and the global networks built to work around both.
Coming soonThe NoSQL Movement
The Dynamo paper, MongoDB hype, Cassandra, HBase - and what survived when the dust settled.
Coming soonQueues and Event Streams
From Redis-backed background jobs to SQS to Kafka: how async processing became the backbone of distributed systems.
Coming soonVirtual Machines and the Cloud
Xen, EC2, and how abstracting hardware changed everything about building for the web.
Coming soonContainers and Orchestration
Docker, OCI, Kubernetes, and the next layer of abstraction over infrastructure.
Coming soonContinuous Delivery
From FTP uploads to deployment pipelines: how shipping software became a solved problem.
Coming soonMonitoring and Observability
From Nagios to StatsD to distributed traces: the evolution of understanding production systems.
Coming soon