Backend Banter #037 - Caddy Chronicles with Matt Holt
Jan 23, 2024
Matt Holt, renowned figure in backend engineering and creator of Caddy, discusses the origins of Caddy, its advantages as a web server, configuration language, sponsorships, certification course creation, server-side telemetry and finding Caddy
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Role Of Web Servers Versus App Servers
- Reverse proxies like NGINX, Apache, and Caddy separate web concerns from business logic and handle TLS, compression, and rate limiting.
- Caddy aims to be a modern, adaptable web server written in Go that offloads web plumbing from app servers.
Standardize On A Canonical Config
- Use JSON as Caddy's canonical config and convert other formats into it to avoid fragmenting configuration logic.
- Pick the configuration language you prefer, convert it to JSON, and let Caddy operate on that canonical form.
Automate Trust For Internal TLS
- For internal TLS you can operate Caddy as a certificate authority, but you must install its root CA on clients.
- Use tooling to automate trust provisioning across machines to avoid manual, error-prone steps.