Chapters
Each chapter explores a foundational idea in web architecture - where it came from, how it evolved, and why it works the way it does today.
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