Follow a request, start to finish
Trace a request through networking, security, compute, storage and observability. Step through it, click any component, or switch to an event-driven or failure scenario.
A teaching model: real systems don’t route every request through every component. The scenario decides the path.
Lessons behind each step
Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
Serve static content from edge servers near your users instead of a single origin.
Scalability & PerformanceLoad Balancing
Spread traffic across healthy servers so no single machine becomes the bottleneck.
APIs & SecurityAPI Gateway
A single front door that routes, secures and shapes traffic to your back-end services.
APIs & SecurityAPI Authentication Methods
Basic auth, API keys, sessions, JWT bearer tokens and OAuth 2.0 compared.
Scalability & PerformanceCaching Strategies
Keep frequently read data close and fast, and decide carefully how it stays fresh.
Messaging & MicroservicesMessage Brokers: RabbitMQ vs Kafka vs ActiveMQ
Queues and logs for decoupling services — and how the three popular brokers differ.
Messaging & MicroservicesResilience: Timeouts, Retries & Circuit Breakers
Contain failures so one slow dependency doesn’t take the whole system down.
Cloud & DeliveryObservability: Logs, Metrics & Traces
Know what your system is doing, why it is slow and where it failed.