
Ask HN: Where do i go from here? - alvarosevilla95
So I&#x27;m on my journey to learn web development. I understand frontend, html, css, js, react, bootstrap etc. I also know how to develop backends, with experience with django node and go. I&#x27;ve done sql databases as well.<p>However, I have no idea how to go from an app on a server that can handle 5 users to an actual product that can serve millions of users. I don&#x27;t understand scalability. I hear all these terms like microservices, containers and load balancers, and while I understand a lot of them individually, I don&#x27;t understand how they come together.<p>Does anyone have any advice in how to advance in my learning? Thank you.
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stephenr
This may sound biased (as it's how I make my money) but I would suggest you
work on an app, and get someone to help you with the ops, and specifically
tell them you want to learn about how things work.

In terms of development practices, I would suggest you ignore things like
containers and micro services etc for now.

As a learning exercise try this:

Use something like vagrant, and setup a project with two boxes. Then have your
app running on _both_ , but the database (and any other storage processes like
Redis, etc) running on just one. You could also do this with a third box just
for the database, but that's up to you.

In a real-world situation, the above scenario would be multiple servers
hosting the database server, redis server, etc - we're just trying to get you
used to "I can't just stick stuff on local disk" without worrying about
setting up a working DB cluster.

Make it work regardless of which server you access the web app from.

Hint: Depending on your framework/language the key thing here will be handling
user sessions via something other than web-server-local storage.

Honestly I don't think it's _bad_ for a developer to understand the basics of
how infrastructure works, and if you're particularly interested it can be a
very rewarding field to work in, but for the love of tacos, please don't fall
into the trap of thinking "Oh, so I guess DevOps means all developers need to
be Ops now".

Happy to discuss further with you, if you'd like.

