General Idea of Networking
Recently I started the Cloud Engineering course on Google Career Launchpad Program, where I encountered the term “Networking”. It’s supposed to be a familiar term that surrounds me in my everyday life, but I was overwhelmed by the words and terms networking covers.
When trying to understand what networking really is, I started to ask myself, what’s the first computer networking on Earth?1 I then learned that the origin of it is related to the cold war, which involves USA and USSR.2 They wanted to have an extremely secure way of communication, thus, packet switching was invented by Paul Baran.
Networking is a way to transmit data between machines. It could be a computer, a mobile, a printer, etc. Although the idea may sound simple, but it actually raises tons of questions as it scales.
- Security
- Performance
- Protocol
- …
There are some general terms that I should know about networking before diving deeper.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Connection | Established before transferring data. |
| May be destructed after transferring data. | |
| Packet | Smallest unit for data transmission. |
| Header + Body(payload) | |
| LAN | Local Area Network |
| Private | |
| WAN | Wide Area Network |
| Public | |
| Protocol | A set of rules and standards that define how machines communicate. |
| TCP(Transmission Control Protocol) | |
| UDP(User Datagram Protocol) | |
| HTTP(Hypertext Transfer Protocol) | |
| HTTPS(Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) | |
| SSH(Secure Shell) | |
| Port | An address on a single machine that is specifically for a certain part of software. |
| Firewall | Decides the inbound/outbound traffic for a server. |
| TCP/IP model | An address on a single machine that is specifically for a certain part of software. |
| Application | |
| Transport | |
| Internet | |
| Link |