Back End Tech

Web Servers | App Servers | APIs | Databases Auth Services

Web Servers

• NGINX Asynch, non-blocking. Kubernetes Ingress fame. Owned by F5.
• Apache HTTPD Honored ancestor. Preinstalled on CentOS, Ubuntu. Uses .htaccess files.

Load Balancers

• NGINX
• HAProxy
• AWS Elastic Load Balancing

App Servers

Java

• Tomcat, Tomcat Embedded
• Jetty
• Spring Boot
• Dropwizard Embedded Jetty, Google Guava, Hibernate
• JHipster App generator: Spring Boot plus AngualarJS (sadly).

Python

• DJango CMS, large projects
• Flask No asynch.

GoLang

• Hugo GoLang
• Gin Identical syntax to Django.
• Beego Similar to Django, MVC, ORM
• Others: Echo, Kit, Fiber, Iris, Go-zero, Kratos

NodeJS

• Express MVC
• Fastify 4x faster than Express
• Koa
• tRPC TS RPCs, new, growing
• SvelteKit data fetching API, GraphQL
• Nest
• Remix Server Can run in Deno, Cloudflare Workers
• Strapi headless CMS and API REST server.

Other

• WordPress PHP
• Laravel PHP

APIs

• OpenAPI was Swagger API definition
• REST
  • Express.js NodeJS
  • FastAPI Async. Highest performing Python.
  • Spring Boot JAX-RS (rest easy?) REST.
    • Eclipse Jersey (JAX-RS)
• GraphQL
  • Apollo
  • GraphiQL IDE

Serverless

Kubernetes

• Kubeless Lambda compatible
• Knative Dev by Google, IBM, RedHat, vmware. Uses CloudEvents. Needs BIG cluster.

Cloud

• AWS Lambda
  • Serverless Framework
• GCP Firebase Cloud Functions
• Azure Serverless
• AWS Fargate Serverless for containers.
• Netlify Functions

Other

• AWS Outposts Lambda

Databases

• NoSQL

  • MongoDB OG NoSQL. Multicloud option.
  • AWS DynamoDB NoSQL. Key-value. Serverless.
  • Apache Cassandra NoSQL. Distributed. Fault tolerant. Elastic.

• In Memory

  • Redis Cache, message broker. Lua scripting. See also AWS Elasticache.
  • Memcached key-value. Aimpler than Redis.
  • AWS Elasticache Managed Redis or Memcached. Which?

• Headless CMS

  • Contentful
  • Sanity.io
  • Strapi

• RDMS

  • PostgresSQL I pick this over MySQL/Maria because the license is cleaner. PostgresSQL 9.3 and higher has a NoSQL option.
  • MS SQLServer RDMS. I’ve used this over the years at various jobs. See also Azure SQL.
  • Oracle RDMS. I used this at Reed College. I wrote a PLSQL stored procedure. You can also write them in Java. Powerful but super expensive, largely legacy.
  • AWS Aurora RDMS. MySQL and PostgresSQL compatible. Oracle killer.
  • SQLite: embedded in web client or IOT devices. PostgresSQL syntax.

• Graph DBs

  • Graph DBs and the Semantic Web
  • Neo4J
  • AWS Neptune
  • GrapahDB

• Object Storage and Warehouse

  • AWS S3 with Athena
  • AWS S3 with Select
  • AWS Redshift
  • GCP BigQuery

Auth Services

• Okta
• Auth0 Bought by Okta.
• GCP Firebase
• AWS Cognito
• SAML An option in many of the above services.