In this lesson, you will learn what a web server is and how it delivers websites and web applications to users. You will be introduced to popular Linux web servers such as Apache and Nginx, including important concepts such as document roots, virtual hosts, ports, logs, and web server services.

You will also learn the basic concept of load balancing and why organizations use multiple web servers to improve performance and availability.

The lesson introduces HAProxy as a load balancer and reverse proxy. You will understand how HAProxy receives client requests and distributes them across several backend servers using methods such as round robin and least connections.

By the end of this lesson, you should understand the role of web servers and the basic structure of an HAProxy load-balancing environment.