There are a lot of reasons why people choose to shop at one online store over another or pick one streaming service over another from the type of service they are getting to pricing, quality and, you’ve guessed it from the title, speed. The speed to which I’m referring is the speed at which the website loads and reacts to user input. In one of my previous articles about netwok latency, I’ve talked about how big of a difference even a two-second extra delay makes.

On December 9, 2021, a vulnerability was reported that could allow a system running Apache Log4j 2 version 2.14.1 or below to be compromised and allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable server. This vulnerability was registered on the National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2021-44228, with a severity score of 10. Here is a diagram of the attack chain from the Swiss Government Computer Emergency Response Team (GovCERT).

Three seconds is all it takes before your customer decides to leave. Would you imagine that! The audacity of some people! But, can you really blame them? We live in a fast-paced world. Wasting people’s time is worse than wasting their money. Developers are striving to provide value in as short of time as possible. Just as I am now writing this tutorial. I’m adamant about not wasting your time but providing you with concrete info for you to learn something new.

Apache – the technology that powers the web. I’m not sure if that is correct, but I think that we wouldn’t see the world wide web in its current shape without it. Launched in 1995 and since April 1996, it has been the most popular web server around the world. Because of handling your users’ requests, Apache serves as the front application. It is crucial to understand what your server is doing, what file users are accessing, from where they came, and much, much more.

NGINX is a popular web server featuring a wide range of capabilities, including reverse proxy, mail proxy, HTTP cache, and load balancing. It offers TLS offloading and a health check of the backends and supports gRPC, WebSocket, and HTTP/2. In short, NGINX is a one-stop solution for most of your web server needs. When using NGINX, monitoring its metrics is crucial for tackling issues.

Linux is one of the most popular operating systems today, powering a large portion of the Internet. According to W3Techs, almost half of today’s top-ranked 1 million websites currently run on Linux systems. So, if you want your site—and the application(s) running on it—to be high-performing with lots of uptime, you need to ensure the availability and reliability of your Linux-based servers.

Apache Cassandra is a distributed database known for its high availability, fault tolerance, and near-linear scaling. It was initially developed by Facebook, but it is a widely used open-source system used by the largest tech companies in the world. There are numerous reasons behind its popularity, including no single point of failure, exceptional horizontal scaling with a data layout designed as a perfect fit for time-series data.

As developers, we would like our users to interact with applications that run smoothly and without issues. We want the libraries that we create to be widely adopted and successful. All of that will not happen without the code that handles errors. Java exception handling is often a significant part of the application code. You might use conditionals to handle cases where you expect a certain state and want to avoid erroneous execution – for example, division by zero.

So you finally launched your service worldwide, great! The next thing you’ll see is thousands and thousands of people flooding into your amazing website from all corners of the world expecting to have the same experience regardless of their location. Here is where things get tricky. Having an infrastructure that will support the expansion of your service across the globe without sacrificing user experience is going to be real though as distance will introduce latency.

The Apache HTTP Server (httpd) is a widely used, open-source web server application. Because you can easily customize it through modules, it has become the go-to choice of both individuals powering their personal blogs and enterprises running high-traffic websites and web apps. It’s a well-known fact that with high traffic, the performance of Apache web servers can take a hit, experiencing bottlenecks as your traffic scales up, which will lead to delayed responses.