Deploying and managing web applications

Traditional software is downloaded, installed, then run. With web applications it is different. These are built, then pushed to a remote server and then the interface of that application is presented to the screen of the users via web-technologies like HTML, CSS & JavaScript, in the past sometimes assisted by Flash, these days using WASM. Besides that web applications need databases, storage, cache-systems, maybe a search solution, and sometimes more dedicated tools. From the end-user's perspective, it became a lot easier (although more restrictive) to access these tools, but getting it up and running got harder.

In the old days web software was deployed by uploading software via FTP, in a folder that was then read by a web server, and then presented to the user of the web-application. I've also deployed compiled .war files manually via a tomcat web-interface. Databases, storage, these were all pretty much managed by hand, sometimes even requiring physically adding a new drive or…

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