Flexible Architectures for Web Performance

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.

Transcript

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 @SergeyChe@WebPerf.social https://www.sergeychernyshev.com/ Q&A