From the course: Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End

Server technologies

From the course: Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End

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Server technologies

- One of the most important devices on the web are servers. Now a server is just a computer running specialized software that receives requests and serves them to another device. And most of the servers don't even run on physical machines anymore. They run the software on virtual machines which live in the cloud. Now the cloud is a worldwide network of computers that hosts applications by creating virtual machines configured, managed, and run by companies like Microsoft, Amazon, or Google. And different server applications can live in the same machine or in different servers. Applications can specialize in serving websites, data, delivering streaming services, and lots of other specialized functionality. One of the first decisions you'll make when you need to host a site, is the address of your site. So, a site like LinkedIn has to use a domain name that will be easily remembered by folks visiting the site. What you do is purchase a domain name and then include a TLD or Top-Level Domain like .com, .org, or .edu. Now you can also ask for country specific domains like .ly, .co, and .ca. In the old days there were only a few TLDs available for purchase. But they have recently grown to include more than a thousand. So you can include things like .tech, .basketball, and even .viking. Cloud services specialize in providing virtual machines and applications that are elastic in nature. So they grow based on your needs. So you only purchase the services you need. And as your site grows and you gain more users your speed, memory and throughput can adjust. Now there are three major providers for the services like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure for Microsoft. If your site needs to deliver maximum speed, it really matters how far the customer is from the server. You can place data closer to your users by using a Content Delivery Network or CDN. Now this is going to create copies of your site's information in multiple places throughout the world so that users can get to it quicker. Servers are what makes the web possible. As a back-end developer, you will often work on configuring and getting the most out of them. But even front-end developers and designers need to know how to interact and send files to and from servers.

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