The history of web application architecture

https://plainvanillaweb.com/blog/articles/2025-07-13-history-architecture/

• everyone has heard of the adage “If you don’t choose a framework, you’ll end up building a worse one yourself.”

• 74% of Amazon’s profit is made from AWS, and over a third of Microsoft’s from Azure.

• the word serverless in the context of serverless functions was and is highly amusing to me, since it requires just as many servers, if not more. (I know why it’s called that way, that doesn’t make it any less funny.)

• Go talk to some people just starting out with web development and see how lost they get in trying to figure out all of this stuff, learning all the technologies comprising the Rube Goldberg machine that produces a webpage at the end. See just how little time they have left to dedicate to learning vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, arguably the key things a beginner should be focusing on.

• Microservices and serverless functions are not as hyped as they were, people are happy to build so-called monoliths again, and frameworks are happy to recommend they do so.