In this tutorial, we are going to explore the high-level engineering and system architecture behind Yaws (Yet Another Web Server). We will also look at how it is utilized in the WhatsApp architecture.
Yaws
Yaws (Yet Another Web Server) is an open-source Erlang Web Server that is very popular due to its stability, scalability, and reliability. Many important Erlang features include Distributed Erlang, Erlang bit syntax, Erlang term storage (ETS), and the Mnesia database. Yaws is a general-purpose HTTP Web Server, so it has numerous features like AJAX support, Common Gateway Interface (CGI), application embedding, and response streaming. The core of Yaws is relatively simple and is surrounded by the implementation of these features.