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Back-End Servers & Stacks

[general]

Definition

The hardware and operating system that host the application logic, web server, and database. It represents the Data Access Layer in the three-tier architecture.

Software Components

A server typically hosts:

  1. Web Server (Apache, Nginx)
  2. Database (MySQL, SQL Server)
  3. Development Framework (PHP, .NET, Django)
  4. Extra Layers: Hypervisors, Containers (Docker), and WAFs.
  • LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
  • WAMP: Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
  • WINS: Windows, IIS, .NET, SQL Server.
  • XAMPP: Cross-Platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl.

Hosting & Scalability

  • On-Premise: Running on a single physical server.
  • Cloud/Virtualization: Using services like AWS/GCP or Containers (Docker) to distribute load and isolate components.