My goal in this guide is both to answer these questions, and, more importantly, provide an overall framework you can use to think about how to answer these questions.

Microservices one of these ideas that are nice in practice, but all manner of complexity comes out when it meets reality. For this reason, I wanted to write this article to capture some of these and redress the balance.

If you are a web developer, you’ve probably heard of nginx (pronounced engine-x). Nginx is a fast and extremely powerful http and reverse proxy server that can be used to quickly and easily serve webpages. § Unfortunately, like many sysops tools, there is very little documentation and very few tutorials that explain how it works and how to get up and running. There is a wiki, which is extensive and confusing - showing you all possible options rather than presenting the important ones as you need them. After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up.

ApiAxle is a proxy that sits on your network, in front of your API(s) and manages things that you shouldn't have to like rate limiting, authentication and caching. It's fast, open and easy to configure.

ElasticInbox is open source, reliable, distributed, scalable email store. The goal of this project is to provide highly available email store without a single point of failure which can run on commodity hardware and scale linearly. ElasticInbox can easily scale to millions of mailboxes, with hundreds of thousands messages in each mailbox.

Perdition is a POP3, IMAP4 and managesieve proxy server. It is able to handle both plain-text and SSL/TLS encrypted connections, and redirect users to a real-server based on a database lookup. Perdition supports modular based database access. ODBC, MySQL, PostgreSQL, GDBM, POSIX Regular Expression and NIS modules ship with the distribution. The API for modules is open allowing arbitrary modules to be written to allow access to any data store. Perdition has many uses. Including, creating large mail systems where an end-user's mailbox may be stored on one of several hosts, integrating different mail systems together, migrating between different email infrastructures, and bridging plain-text and SSL/TLS services. It can also be used as part of a firewall. The use of perditon to scale mail services beyond a single box is discussed in high capacity email.

This is an interview with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of Duck Duck Go and general all around startup guru, on what DDG’s architecture looks like in 2012.

If there's one point that we want to communicate to the world, it's that SSL/TLS is not computationally expensive any more. Ten years ago it might have been true, but it's just not the case any more. You too can afford to enable HTTPS for your users.

In January this year (2010), Gmail switched to using HTTPS for everything by default. Previously it had been introduced as an option, but now all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

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CloudFlare can be used by anyone with a website and their own domain, regardless of your choice in platform. From start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. [...] If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. Our core service is free and we offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.

Cloud Foundry, a VMware-led project is the world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. Cloud Foundry provides a platform for building, deploying, and running cloud apps using Spring for Java developers, Rails and Sinatra for Ruby developers, Node.js and other JVM frameworks including Grails.