Load Balancing and HTTP
We’re going to take a slightly different approach with this chapter, so buckle up. On the one hand, we’re going to review some background on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and focus on some misconceptions that trip up many web developers in the real world.
On the other hand, we’re going to keep this practical and cover one of the most powerful standard HTTP tools that’s available on the command line, curl. Specifically, we’re going to teach you the basics of curl in the context of how you can use it to troubleshoot common web application issues.
We assume that if you’re a web developer, you already know your way around HTTP. So, while the goal of this chapter is not to teach you the absolute basics of this protocol, we are going to review some of those basics to get you up to speed if it’s been a while. If you are totally new to HTTP, there is lots of excellent documentation on the web that you...
