HTTP Fundamentals Workshop




Joint Workshop with Michael Arenzon

HTTP is the de-facto standard protocol of the internet and heavily used in almost all systems - in depth understanding of HTTP is crucial for design, performance scaling and day to day operations.

Part 1 (~1h) HTTP Overview - History and Concepts

  • Where is HTTP in the protocol stack, re-cap of HTTP versions, overview of well-known web servers (Apache/Nginx)
  • Concepts - URI, method type, status code, header, etc.
  • Advanced topics - Virtual hosting, Reverse/Forward proxies, TLS, protocol extensions, load-balancer, CDN.
  • HTTP/2

Part 2 (~2h) [Hands On] Writing a web server

  • Creating a basic HTTP server from scratch (URL and headers parsing, req/res flow)
  • Implementing virtual hosting and dynamic routing
  • Improving client handling with cache, compression, timeouts and keepalive.

Part 3 (~1h) [Hands On] Implementing advanced features

  • Reverse proxy, SSE, SNI-based routing (TLS)
  • HTTP pipelining (/multiplexing) and head-of-line blocking

Speaker

avishai-ish-shalom

Avishai Ish-Shalom

 
Avishai is a veteran operations and software engineer with years of high scale production experience. At present, Avishai helps growing startups and the Israeli high-tech eco-system as Engineer in ...