Application Architectures - The Practice of Cloud System Administration - page 93

Exercises
1. Describe the single-machine, three-tier, and four-tier web application architectures.
2. Describe how a single-machine web server, which uses a database to generate con-
tent, might evolve to a three-tier web server. How would this be done with minimal
downtime?
3. Describe the common web service architectures, in order from smallest to largest.
4. Describe how different local load balancer types work and what their pros and
cons are. You may choose to make a comparison chart.
5. What is “shared state” and how is it maintained between replicas?
6. What are the services that a four-tier architecture provides in the first tier?
7. What does a reverse proxy do? When is it needed?
8. Suppose you wanted to build a simple image-sharing web site. How would you
design it if the site was intended to serve people in one region of the world? How
would you then expand it to work globally?
9. What is a message bus architecture and how might one be used?
10. What is an SOA?
11. Why are SOAs loosely coupled?
12. How would you design an email system as an SOA?
13. Who was Christopher Alexander and what was his contribution to architecture?