Platform services provide a platform for developers to completely build and deploy software applications, without having to deal with OS maintenance, server hardware, networking or other services that are needed to use the platform tools. A web server that we deploy our web applications to, or the development software that we use to code our applications are both examples of platform services. In this day and age. Most businesses have a digital presence. Whether that's a Web site that promotes their business, or even a website that is their business. Businesses that run web services keep their services stored on a web server. A web server stores and serves content to clients through the Internet. You can access web service using a domain name like Google dot com. A web server itself stores web files and runs an HTTP service or HTTP server, that processes HTTP requests. Remember that HTTP is how the Web formats and transfer's web pages. You can think of the web server as the physical server that stores with files and the HTTP server software. When your web browser makes a request to fetch a web page from a URL, it sends an HTTP request that gets processed by the HTTP server. Then the HTTP server sends out and HTTP response with the content that you requested. There are a lot of popular HTTP server software out there. But the most widely used is the Apache HTTP server, most commonly referred to as Apache. Apache is a free and open source. It helps serve a large percentage of web pages on the Internet. Let's actually see how a web server serves content to the Web. I'm going to install the Apache Web server software or my Linux computer here. You don't have to understand the specifics of the setup. I just want you to see how easy it is to run a web service. So, let me go ahead and install Apache. So, I'm going to go ahead and do sudo. Apt get. Install. Apache. To. And then hit the flag. Yes to accept. All my packages. Perfect. Now I will web server services running on our machine. We're actually able to start hosting web content. The machine that we're hosting our content on is well, this machine right here. Remember that our computer has an IP address that's associated with itself 1 2 7 0 0 dot 1 or a hostname of localhost. Localhost itself is reserved for this purpose. So, it's not possible to get the domain name localhost. So, now that we know our machines location, lets enter it to the web browser. And here it is, our local web server content running on our machine. The files we see here, come with the default Apache installation. But if we want to upload our own web content, you can just navigate to the directory where this is stored, and replace it with our web content. Remember, that since this contemn is hosted on our local machine. We will need to use DNS to let the world know that our web server exists. If you need a refresher on this, feel free to go back to the lesson on DNS services. That's a quick rundown of how web servers work. You can read more about Apache and other HTTP servers in the next supplemental reading. System administrators are responsible for creating the content that gets served. But they might be responsible for making sure that content is available. If you're an IT support specialist with a web service that needs to be manage, you should have a pretty good understanding of how it works.