Web Architecture 101

https://engineering.videoblocks.com/web-architecture-101-a3224e126947/?ref=abhimanyu

by aksxna • 8 years ago

430 47 8 years ago

engineering.videoblocks.com

Zaheer• 8 years ago

This is a great overview! It's a shame this sort of thing isn't taught in schools (from my very own anecdotal university experience).

aksxna• 8 years ago

While I agree that a precursor to these concepts would be a great initiator, however I also believe that a good appreciation for scaling technologies can only be developed by getting hands on and working with a high traffic website. Just reading the theory might not help that well.

meowface• 8 years ago

These things were taught at my university (Information Systems major), but the info was pretty out-of-date and not as practical as this article.

sna1l• 8 years ago

I found the book "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann to be a good, practical primer on a lot of these topics.

If you want to go deeper on any of the subjects he discusses, his references for every chapter are solid and provide a deeper understanding.

sciurus2• 8 years ago

Sure, it's a great book, but it only covers a few of these topics (maybe 4, 6a, 5, and 9) and covers a lot that goes beyond them. It's a book I would heartily recommend, but not for someone whose primary goal was to learn about web architecture.

quickpost2• 8 years ago

Any other books you'd recommend that come closer to fully covering the topic this post discusses?

wenc2• 8 years ago

I'm a big fan of DDIA (I have a copy in front of me right now), but the topics covered in DDIA are much more around distributed systems and databases, in short "data architecture", i.e. batch, streaming, derived data, transactions, consistency, etc.

The article above is more about "web architecture".

There is some overlap but DDIA largely doesn't really cover the same topics.

quickpost2• 8 years ago

Any other books you'd recommend that come closer to fully covering the topic this post discusses?

kgoutham93• 8 years ago

Really enjoyed it... Any recommendations for Web architecture 102 ?

spraak2• 8 years ago

I posted this above in reply to someone else asking the same question:

Perhaps "Web Scalability for Startup Engineers" by Artur Ejsmont. But I admit I have't read it yet -- I however felt the same as you and started exploring for more resources after coming across this thread.

thinkmassive3• 8 years ago

Without committing to an entire book, perhaps more detail on load-balancing and proxies?

https://blog.envoyproxy.io/introduction-to-modern-network-lo...

dfsegoat• 8 years ago

This is great. It's great for new devs - and even for upper management who may want a simple/executive summary of how modern stacks work.

aaavl28212• 8 years ago

I'd love to see more tutorials / examples of implementing some of these concepts. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but most tutorials I see are just super simple apps and don't deal with load balancing, services, data pipelines etc.

For people who are working in non-tech jobs but teaching themselves programming so they can build useful tools for themselves, colleagues and customers, I think there's a big gap in learning tools. Often these ppl can have enterprise users out of the box bc they understand needs and know people, but can only make hackish solutions that are useful but don't scale well or aren't sufficiently secure. These ppl don't have CS backgrounds and don't code for a living, so going straight into docs can be really overwhelming even if it's the "right" thing to do, esp if it's an architectural choice or security issue where the documentation may not be as straightforward

duxup• 8 years ago

Amen, web content to learn from wise security, back end stuff, architecture doesn't get enough coverage.

There are so many super simple app tutorials that are an island to themselves that might get your other super simple app going, but they don't even give lip service to any deeper concepts or what is going on the back end.

I have a theory that the volume of basic copy this code type tutorials is because they are really resume fodder.... I've run through some tutorials that are downright misleading IMO, and I could tell that as a noob myself.

I was playing with one recently that I wondered, hey can I make it do X too? But the code was laid out and ran so wonky that it was just easier for me to start fresh on my own. It was a react tutorial and even running it as provided it ran but react was all wtfareyodoing.jpg in the console... right out of the tutorial... come on.

I wish people would quit it with the code tutorials as resume content.

As for security I finished a boot camp recently and I asked about security, the answer "We really don't address security."

I have a networking background so I could see a lot that was missing that folks really should know...but not even given lip service.

rubber_duck2• 8 years ago

I'm guessing, but IMO when you're dealing with load balancing, services and data pipelines you're at a scale where you should be able to hire qualified people to do the job so the docs are geared towards that audience.

aaavl28212• 8 years ago

You're probably right re load balancing, data pipelines and some services, but i think security is important regardless of scale, esp if it's an enterprise app.

Even simpler concepts like structuring and deployment of larger apps, database migration, creating dev, staging and production environments, test development etc would be really useful. These things are important even at low scale, and generally absent from tutorials. Learning this on your own without mentors or CS background creates lots of issues

mehblahwhatevs2• 8 years ago

I too am in great need of things like that.

I'm a mobile dev developing an app that I think I'm going to quit my job for to work on full time. I'm 33 and in over a decade of doing mobile (and front-end web) programming I've never worked on a personal project that showed as much promise as this one has for me, both financially and from a fulfillment standpoint.

However the prospect of wrangling the back-end and all the new things I need to do around deploying, scaling, containers, separation of services: cache, API, queue, DB, and making it all secure on top of that is giving me pause and making me less confident the more I read :(

mnm1• 8 years ago

Nah, don't let that discourage you. You can probably start with a Postgres backend that will serve as your db, full text search, data warehouse, and even job queue. Load balancers in front of your stack are available from aws, etc. and are easy to set up. The rest, like a caching redis server, actual job queue, etc. you can add as you go if it becomes needed. Some language stacks let you run async operations and queues in the server itself which may be enough. There is no need for containers or complicated deployment processes. If you're on the JVM, for example, just create an uberjar and run that. Focus on things that actually bring value to your business and use the simplest, most minimal solution everywhere else. Don't give up on your idea because you feel overwhelmed. Good luck.

hackermailman2• 8 years ago

Experiment with abstracting the shit out of RabbitMQ to solve any business logic problem. I'm in a different CS field than web development but whenever I've had to implement something business related it almost always was just highly abstract message brokering with React hacked together UI. I learned UI from reading lecture notes on 'Human Computer Interface' design from the plenty of university courses around offering this subject http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05863fall17/schedule.htm...

For learning web app APIs all I did was search Google Scholar for 'API design' and read whatever was available. Joshua Bloch has a good paper on API design. As for scaling, containers, concurrency ect look at Elixir w/Phoenix framework instead, or Erlang w/Yaws and just run it on a cheap FreeBSD comanaged box or deploy Phoenix to Heroku. BEAM will take care of the scaling. There's books around https://pragprog.com/book/lhelph/functional-web-development-...

csnewb• 8 years ago

"Web Application Architecture" by Leon Shklar is a good read for a detailed description.

aportnoy2• 8 years ago

Can anyone recommend an introduction to web architecture in the more general and less complex sense? I would like to learn about how the browser interacts with the server (I don't care about load balancing or caching for now), how JS interacts with HTML and CSS, how API's work?

I know a common architecture is JS in the browser making requests to the server and receives JSON and then renders it somehow. Sometime the server renders stuff itself and sends it to the browser, right?

And then there's possibly a database attached to the server.

How does all that work?

zefool• 8 years ago

I wrote an article on learning web development, might be useful to you. Here's the link: https://medium.com/career-change-coder/how-i-broke-into-web-...

If you're only looking for high-level concepts, Crash Course has some good episodes about the workings of the internet.

aportnoy2• 8 years ago

Thank you, some of the references were helpful!

x13pixels• 8 years ago

I'm sure this has been said before but this reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJQU22Ttpwc

sixdimensional2• 8 years ago

Funny.. I just had to diagram the same kind of generic thing at my day job. And it's almost exactly the same.

Nicely done and a good share!

sixdimensional2• 8 years ago

Random thought, but when you see that.. it also makes more visible a little bit more, what it means to be responsible for the "full-stack" in 2018.

collyw2• 8 years ago

Skyscanners "Full Stack Test" was entirely in Javascript when I got asked to do it. Screw that, its not my strong point. Apparently the alternative is Hackerrank for systems engineers when I mentioned that to them. Hiring in our industry is a shambles.

iandanforth• 8 years ago

I'd love to see the initial diagram grown step by step. You don't start out this way and it can be extremely informative to see which bits get added when.

vinceguidry• 8 years ago

It depends on the business needs. Generally what happens is a developer will notice that something is going to become a problem and start considering solutions, long before the app becomes unmaintainable. It's all driven by what the application needs.

inestyne• 8 years ago

Best job in the world i can't believe they pay me to do this!

niutech• 8 years ago

This is overcomplicated, you can do it much simpler using some Backend as a Service, like Parse, Hoodie, Backendless or Firebase with a client-side business logic.

Web Architecture 101

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