Scalable Internet Architectures: Static Content
In some of my previous posts, I discussed ways to instrument static content references so their domain is configurable. This small aspect of application-level design makes it possible to offload static content delivery to a separate infrastructure from the application pages.
Chapter 6 in Scalable Internet Architectures focuses on Static content, that aspect of web applications that is sometimes an afterthought to web developers.
Before reading this chapter, I though in two steps for web application design: A single web farms delivering all static + dynamic content. To scale beyond that, the next choice is using a [potentially expensive] CDN with dynamic capabilities such as Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator. It turns out there are many interesting solutions in between these two.
The first lightbulb to go off in my head was this: Even though a web application may rely on ASP.NET and therefore Windows, you can scale its ability to serve static content using commodity hardware and free operating systems.
Secondly, an Apache-based solution is not necessarily required either. There are many other free – simpler – web servers that can be leveraged for serving static content, including thttpd and Squid.
