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10 Must-Know Concepts of Modern Web Architecture
Widely used generic cloud computing components in modern web-based software systems
After Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW (World Wide Web) in 1989, almost all types of physical services started moving to the cloud ecosystem. Before the rapid evolution of the internet, there were remotely connected desktop applications. Users had to install different desktop applications to perform various online activities such as online messaging and there was no web browser. Berners-Lee presented the initial working concept of WWW with a web browser, web server, and HTML.
After that, websites and web applications started growing rapidly. Earlier, we had static web pages with Web 1.0. But now, we have highly dynamic, user-friendly, and interactive web applications thanks to Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. Web application architecture also evolved from the simple monolithic client-server model to highly scalable microservices in order to handle massive traffic coming from internet users.
Every modern web application architecture has common cloud computing theoretical components that every developer should know. Cloud service providers may promote these components by using various names, but the underlying theoretical cloud computing component remains the same.
I researched some modern tech giants’ different web application architectures (Netflix, Medium, Airbnb, and Facebook) and found the following building blocks.
1. Server
A server refers to a computer that provides a service (or multiple services) over a private network or internet. Other devices known as clients can connect the server to obtain the provided service via different network ports. Servers are typically named based on the service they provide. For example, if a server accepts HTTP requests from port 80 and serves web pages to clients, the particular server is known as a web server. Likewise, we have file servers, mail servers, authentication servers, database servers, email servers, application servers, etc.
Nowadays, virtual servers are more popular than bare-metal servers. Cloud service providers create virtual machines on top of their physical hardware by using hypervisors and…
