> I think I finally understand how serving web applications works
It's nice to see you got a lot out of the article but this is hardly a complete course on how the web works from the server side. It is more of a quick guide on a number of common server set-ups for mid sized web sites. If you want to learn more about 'how web serving applications work' I suggest you follow one of the how to guides about setting up a web server of your own and serving up a couple of pages. You won't need any extra hardware for this, all the software is 'open source' and won't cost you a dime. Depending on what kind of operating system you normally use you could start with any of these:
>It's nice to see you got a lot out of the article but this is hardly a complete course on how the web works from the server side. It is more of a quick guide on a number of common server set-ups for mid sized web sites. If you want to learn more about 'how web serving applications work' I suggest you follow one of the how to guides about setting up a web server of your own and serving up a couple of pages.
I actually meant just the hardware aspect of the setup, sorry for the confusion. That said, I'm still super interested in how the actual serving works. The resources you've provided seem to be exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks so much for providing those.
My experience is in HPC where 'serving content' actually means 'sending data to other nodes'. The upside of this is that in a compute cluster, all the nodes are, usually, in the same room and are actually located very close together. There's still a lot of networking involved in getting the nodes to communicate, but it's super interesting to me to see how to scale things on the web where nodes are not necessary even located in the same country! The example of having the DB and application servers on different machines is a good example.
Anyway, sorry for the digression, and thanks again for the links. It'll be bed-time reading for me :)
