Understanding HTTP/S, CDNs and Edge Proxies

SHOW: 421

DESCRIPTION: Brian talks with Julia Evans (@b0rk, software engineer, data scientist, ‘zine artist) about the fundamentals of HTTP/HTTPS, and the interaction of web traffic with CDNs, Load-Balancers and Edge Proxies. 

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CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK:

• DOD awards JEDI contract to Microsoft 
• AWS revenues grow, but growth continue to slow
• Google’s profitability drops, but “other” business (which includes GCP) did exceed expectations
• Spotify podcast growth +39%

SHOW INTERVIEW LINKS:

• Julia Evans Blog
• Wizard Zines

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Before we get into a broader discussion, tell us a little bit about your background. 

Topic 1a - We’ve followed your “zines” via Twitter for a while. They cover quite a large number of topics. Give us some background on how you started taking this self-learning process and turning it into a visual medium?

Topic 2 - You’ve recently been doing a bunch of work around HTTP. Most people know HTTP as the thing they type into a web-browser (sometimes). Let’s dig into why it might be important for people to know more about how the lifecycle of HTTP can impact their application performance.

Topic 3 - Lots of the content we access on the Internet is stored/cached in CDNs around the world. Walk us through the basics of how CDNs work, and some of the interactions between HTTP and CDNs that can either improve performance or generally make an application’s life miserable. 

Topic 4 - Beyond CDNs, another big element that impacts HTTP traffic is load-balancers. Many people understand how basic IP-load balancing works, but how can it be different between L4 and L7 load-balancers? 

Topic 5 - Now how does encryption factor into all of this, as things like HTTP or TLS become part of the traffic? What are some of the guidelines that either developers or infrastructure teams should be thinking about with regard to those encrypted streams? 

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