Traces consistent hashing from Karger's 1997 ring to virtual nodes, jump hash, Maglev tables, and the bounded-load variant that Vimeo shipped in HAProxy, with the minimal-remapping math that ties them together.
Traces the three proxy roles defined in RFC 9110 — forward proxy, gateway (reverse proxy), and intercepting proxy — and places CDNs, API gateways, and corporate SSL-inspection boxes inside that taxonomy by the direction of trust.
A reference on web application firewalls: positive vs negative security models, signature and parser-based matching, the CRS anomaly-scoring system and its paranoia levels, where a WAF sits in the request path, and how false positives get tuned away.
Traces the content delivery network from the flash-crowd problem and Akamai's 1998 MIT spinout, through Limelight, EdgeCast and CloudFront, to Cloudflare's free tier and the shift to programmable edge compute.