Flexible Architectures for Web Performance Presentation

Today in the web performance space we have a lot of technologies that were invented to speed up various parts of the applications. Many of them are successful when they can be just put in place without changing anything in the applications or at least with minimal changes, like network protocols or image formats.

However some more advanced features like progressive web apps, edge cache for HTML responses, edge workers and few other features like that are hard to implement in the regular web applications incrementally.

To successfully implement them today, applications have to be built with these technologies in mind from the beginning. This rigidity is something that blocks a lot of innovation from reaching the real world applications that desperately need to get faster.

In this talk, Sergey Chernyshev discusses several of these technologies, highlight the importance of Flexible Architectures and proposes a radical idea of Borderless Computation as a possible solution for the problem.

1. Flexible
Architectures
Sergey Chernyshev
NY Web Performance Meetup
May 21, 2024

2. Rover
(not to scale)
Interplanetary Computation

3. Satellite
Mars Base
(not to scale)
Rover
Interplanetary Computation

4. Orbit Station
Moon
Base
Satellite
Rover
Mars
Base
“Cloud”
Mission
Control
Center
Satellites
Latency
(not to scale)
Interplanetary Computation

5. Close to Earth
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…

6. Close to Earth
Server
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…

7. Close to Earth


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

8. Main Thread
Close to Earth


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

9. More Layers: CDN


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

10. Serverless


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

11. Services


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

12. Edge Compute


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

13. Interconnected


Main Thread
Server
Service
Worker
Web
Worker
Rendering
What plant is it?
Check it!
Scan the plant with
your camera and
click the button to…
JS

14. Flexible
Architectures

15. Why do we need it?
today’s architectures are rigid

16. All or Nothing
●Having many architectures is rarely possible
●Search is usually an exception
●“Everything is dynamic” is a usual excuse

17. New Technologies are Hard
●Introducing new workflows is hard
●SPAs were a decade in the making
●Static Generators are often perceived
as “Static is NOT Dynamic”
●PWAs, Edge Compute and etc are still
a mystery to most developers

18. Slower without Re-Architecture

19. Slower without Re-Architecture
…based on my experience…

20. Today’s
Architectures
web-specific

21. ●PHP
●Java
●Python
●NodeJS
Web Pages
CC BY atoach
https://www.flickr.com/photos/atoach/25370605889

22. Single Page Applications (SPA)
●CSR - Browser
●SSR - Server
●Hydration
CC BY Studio Iloinen Liftari
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flamingo_Spa_%26_Wellness.jpg


Where?

23. Static Generators
Where? When?
CC BY JonahPtak
https://www.deviantart.com/jonahptak/art/MCU-T
imeline-Thing-v1-1b-2020-05-14-864229532

24. Cloud Functions & Services
●Amazon Lambda
●Google Cloud Functions
●+ cloud services

25. Edge Workers & CDNs
●Cloudflare Edge workers
●Fastly Edge Compute
●Amazon Lambda at Edge

26. Service Workers and PWAs
●Frameworks?
●Who manually
rolled Service
Worker code?
CC BY Diego González-Zúñiga
https://github.com/webmaxru/progressive-web-apps-logo

27. Web Workers
●What’s your use case?

28. New Architectures
●Every few years
●.
●.
●.
●.
●.
●.
●.
●.
●.
●.
●
NEW!

29. Borderless Code
you don’t care where it runs

30. DEMO
https://github.com/BorderlessFramework
not much to demo

31. No Framework
Necessary
you can do it without a framework

32. What should I do today?
●Use progressive enhancement
●Breakdown apps into parts / layers with different
requirements
●Make architecture choices appropriate to those
requirements
●Don’t make rigid choices that are hard to change
●Use more declarative configurations outside of core logic

33. Notable Developments
●Universal Javascript (already old)
●Event-driven data (also old)
●WASM execution environments (Fastly)
●Edge services - distributed by default, scalable, etc
●Cross-compatible frameworks like Hono
●Framework-defined Infrastructure (Vercel)
●Edge RPC abstractions (Cloudflare)
●RUM and distributed tracing
●AI (everyone)

34. Thank You!
Sergey Chernyshev
@[email protected]
https://www.sergeychernyshev.com/
Q&A