🏗️ What Is Web Architecture?

Now that you understand big data, you need to understand web architecture — the term used to describe the overall structure and design of a web system. Web architecture is the blueprint that determines how a website or web application is built, how its components are organised, and how data flows between them.

A simple website from the early 2000s might have had a basic architecture: one web server, one database, serving a few hundred users. But when a company like Netflix needs to serve 260 million users simultaneously, streaming different videos in different qualities to different devices across 190 countries, that simple architecture collapses instantly. Big data has forced companies to completely redesign how web systems are built.

Key architectural changes driven by big data: Load balancers distribute incoming traffic across many servers. Distributed databases split data across multiple machines. Caching (e.g. Redis) stores frequently accessed data in memory for instant access. CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) place copies of content on servers around the world so users load from a nearby server, not one on the other side of the planet. Microservices break a giant application into small, independent services that can be updated and scaled individually.