Industry Standard Use Cases of Apache HTTP Server

The Apache HTTP Server ("httpd") is an open source, free and most popular HTTP Web Server software that could run on both Unix & Windows type platform. Today we would discuss various industry standard use cases of Apache HTTP Server.

Industry Standard Use Cases of Apache HTTP Server

• For setting up a common project specific software artifacts repository for all the developers in a team (Onshore & Offshore)
  You will think why one would want to use Apache HTTP Server for hosting software/project related artifacts? To answer this question, I would share my experience that is
  
  - Due to advent of Agile, DevOps culture in the software industry, people are rapidly opting various IT automation tool, Provisioning tool, Configuration Management tool for automating their Software Delivery pipeline. For example: Use Vagrant for easily and efficiently creating and configuring reproducible, portable development environments. It's becoming standard practice that project specific software artifacts like putty.exe, gradle.zip, jdk-7u51-linux-i586.gz, mysql-5.1.71-1.el6.x86_64.rpm, apache-maven-3.0.5-bin.tar.gz, centos65-x86_64.box etc are hosted in Apache HTTP Server. From this central location, software are downloaded in all the developers machines by using vagrant. In this way, every developers have the identical development environment which is similar to production/staging/qa. No more "It doesn't work on my machine" excuse.
  
  - Easily download the latest project specific artifacts from central location, no need to send mails to anyone, no follow up, no tension of downloading/having wrong version of artifacts, no more roaming around for finding desired version of software in the internet. 


• For Load Balancing & Hosting Static Website Content
  While designing the technology stack for the enterprise application, it's most common and adapted practice to have Apache HTTP Server as their Web Layer which not only distribute incoming traffic to multiple Application Servers by using software load balancing techniques but also reduce loads of the Application server by directly serving request for all the static assets.

Here I have described the most widely used use cases of Apache HTTP Server that I have came across and used while my tenure in the IT industry. If you have any other use cases in mind, feel free to share through comments. Happy Learning!! :-)