Understanding the End-to-End Process of a Web Request: IP, DNS, CDN, TCP, Protocol Design, CGI/FastCGI, Server Models, and Database Evolution
The article walks through every stage of a web request—from IPv4 addressing, NAT, and DNS resolution through CDN proximity and TCP stream handling, to HTTP framing, CGI versus FastCGI processing, stateless versus stateful server models, and finally database scaling techniques such as sharding and Redis caching.