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 Network: Then and Now
Physical networking constraints from 1993, the evolution from dial-up to broadband, and the infrastructure decisions that shaped everything after.
Coming soonThe Early Web
HTTP design, the initial RFCs, and static HTML document serving - the architectural trade-offs embedded in the web's earliest choices.
Coming soonThe Dynamic Web
CGI, Perl, PHP, and the evolution from library to application platform - how the web learned to compute.
Coming soonLoad Balancers and Proxies
Scaling challenges that required specialized hardware to intercept and reroute requests or serve cached content.
Coming soonState and Sessions
How clients and servers managed primitives beyond individual requests - cookies shipped in 1994, and the RFCs that followed.
Coming soonSSL/TLS and HTTPS
Netscape's secure transport mechanism, the evolution of TLS, and the adoption initiatives like Let's Encrypt that made encryption ubiquitous.
Coming soonScaling Databases
MySQL and PostgreSQL adoption, read-replica implementation, and the community contributions enabling web-scale persistence.
Coming soonCaching
Squid and Varnish as accelerators, memcached and Redis as distributed caching solutions, and the surprising difficulty of not computing the same thing twice.
Coming soonCDNs and the Edge
Consistent hashing, Akamai, and the global networks built to solve the problem of distance and the speed of light.
Coming soonThe API Era
SaaS proliferation, REST standardization, OAuth and OpenID authentication, and the rise of microservice architectures including BFF and GraphQL.
Coming soonNoSQL (including Search)
Google's BigTable paper, Amazon's Dynamo paper, and the tools like Solr and Elasticsearch that redefined data storage and retrieval.
Coming soonQueues and Event Streams
From job systems to ActiveMQ, RabbitMQ, and Kafka: how async processing became the backbone of distributed systems.
Coming soonVirtual Machines and the Cloud
From VMWare Workstation through Xen, AWS, KVM, and microVMs - how abstracting hardware enabled serverless architecture.
Coming soonConfiguration Management and IaaC
CFEngine, Puppet, Chef, and the Infrastructure as Code approaches that enabled automated provisioning at scale.
Coming soonContainers and Orchestration
From chroot and FreeBSD jails through Linux namespaces and cgroups to Docker - the next layer of abstraction over infrastructure.
Coming soonContinuous Delivery
IMVU's multiple daily deployments, Flickr's '10+ Deploys Per Day', and how shipping software became a solved problem.
Coming soonMonitoring and Observability
From basic uptime checks through MRTG, Nagios, Graphite, and StatsD to modern observability principles.
Coming soonSRE and DevOps
The cultural shifts that eliminated barriers between application developers and operations teams.
Coming soon