a list of links to help you make various important architectural decisions
- A Comprehensive Guide to Building a Scalable Web App on Amazon Web Services - Gives a great introduction to the roles of the various layers in web applications. Focuses on AWS, but most of the concepts generalize easy to open source technologies
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The Architecture of Open Source Applications - Explains the architecture of various high-profile open source technologies including load balancers, web servers, message queues, continuous integration, configuration management, and many more
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7 Lessons Learned While Building Reddit To 270 Million Page Views A Month
- Web Servers vs. App Servers in Ruby; Performance Characteristics of Different Server Architectures - Apache vs. Nginx, Apache vs. Passenger, Unicorn vs. Puma, threaded vs. forked, evented vs. non-evented; this StackOverflow answer has lots of great detail answering these questions
- Scaling Ruby Apps to 1000 Requests per Minute - A nice overview of various application server choices in the Ruby landscape
- SOA Choices in Ruby - Pros and cons of various choices you'll need to make when building a SOA
- Microservices vs. Service-Oriented Architecture - Short ebook on the differences between SOA, microservices, and monoliths
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications - NoSQL is all the buzz. This book does a good job of explaining the design tradeoffs and feature differences between different database technologies to try and help you pick the right one for your application
- Explain topics like high availability
- Security
- HTTPS/SSL, private networks
- CI
- Backup & disaster recovery
- Deployment, config management
- Logging
- Monitoring and alerting