Building, running and scaling SaaS demo systems that run around the clock is a big engineering challenge. Through the power of traffic replay, we scaled our demos in a huge way. A few weeks ago we launched a new demo sandbox. This is actually a second generation version of our existing demo system that I built a few months ago (codename: decoy). Because the traffic viewer page shows the most recent data by default, you need to constantly be pumping new data in there. Any type of real-time SaaS system is going to have a similar requirement. So this needs to be planned.

When the internet first came into existence in 1983, its communication channels didn't exist, and it was just operational enough to be used for research purposes. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea to develop a system for the internet using TCP/IP protocols. That public project at CERN introduced HTTP, HTML, World Wide Web (WWW), and a client-server as communication mechanisms. In this post, you'll learn how HTTP protocol works and how new versions brought it to where we are now, with the widely used HTTP/2 in 2021.

Have you ever written a Hello, World! application? In most of these tutorials the first step is to log words to the console. It's an easy way to understand what is going on with your application and readily available in every programming language. The console output is incredibly powerful, and it has become easier than ever to capture that output as logs. As your application grows and evolves you need to implement a structured application log approach.