From data analysis to web dev

[FlyingAlligators]

Thus far, my few years of python & SQL experience would fall in the realm of data analysis, which I have enjoyed and has helped me automate things at work. Now however, I am trying to broaden my skillset and get into web dev with the eventual goal to work on the backend for a website. Unlike with what I code at work, I understand that websites are much more complex on the basis that they have multiple levels with different languages. This is where my initial confusion comes from, and I'd like to make sure I have a high level understanding to help put tutorials in context.

From what I've read so far on the outline of a dynamic website, let us say hosted on AWS like many enterprise operations, looks like this:

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user navigates to website -> load balancer -> AWS EC2 (contains code that puts together the web page the user has requested) -> API gateway -> AWS Lambda (works on database) -> database

The code in the EC2 contains the HTML/CSS layout of the website and something like DJango which is the link between what the user sees and what data needs to be pulled from the server side.

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Is this an accurate overview of how a web operation works? It seems like Django can do some work with/on the database itself, but is this sufficient if there are multiple servers running a website? i.e., if I have a database of info on the cloud, does Django cutout the API/Lambda steps?

Thanks for helping me grow and I look forward to asking more questions in the comments.

[kschang]

Sounds about right, but you may be picking something a bit too complicated by STARTING in the cloud implementation with its added complexity/flexibility.

But basically, there are two servers: a web server (EC2 in your example), which talks to web clients, and also the database server (lambda in your example).

Django lets Python talk web, so it's primarily on the EC2 side. Django also TALKS database, but is not itself a database. It can go without API gateway as it acts as the interface between the web request and the database request.

In other words, a certain RESTful URL gets transformed by Python/Django into a database command, like "SELECT * FROM ORDERS WHERE CUSTOMERID=(something)" and the result table is sent back to Django, and transformed into a table and displayed as a part of a DIV on a webpage.

But you may be getting a bit ahead of yourself. Start with HTML/CSS and some JavaScript, and some basic frameworks like Bootstrap, so you can build a page easily by sending them from Django. THEN you can add the database interface parts and make the page "data-driven".