Talking Code

Modern Web Architecture Fundamentals

Episode Summary

James Ward shares how the hosting landscape has changed for web applications over the years and how you can avoid some of his middle-of-the-night pager nightmares.

Episode Notes

James Ward shares how the hosting landscape has changed for web applications over the years and how you can avoid some of his middle-of-the-night pager nightmares.

Here's what to listen for:

• 00:47 What are the differences between hosting services?
• 05:19 What is a sysadmin?
• 07:14 What is the advantage of having people or a service do system administration for you?
• 09:23 What are some things that Heroku does for you that a lower-level server won’t?
• 13:36 Given all the choices out there, how do you think about where to host your application?
• 17:28 Why might one want to switch between servers?
• 21:58 What are container technologies and why do they matter?
• 24:42 What is virtualization?
• 26:44 Why are app servers fading away?
• 30:02 Are add-ons the way to think about services that are broken out?
• 32:06 Should startups use services like Heroku to start out or roll it yourself?
• 35:13 Why do people want to/think it’s easy to manage production systems themselves?
• 37:01 When should you begin thinking about the scalability of an app?
• 45:33 What is the right way to handle multithreading in Ruby?
• 48:12 What does “stateless” mean? Why should app servers be stateless?