To understand what happens on the hood when i type https://google.com on my web browser and then click enter, i need to understand a few concepts about the internet, they are DNS request, TCP/IP, Firewall, HTPPS/SSL, Load balancer, Web-server, Application Server and Database.
The internet as we know is a global network of interconnected devices that communicate with each other using standardized protocols. It enables the sharing and exchange of information. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is a suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the internet. It provides end to end data communication, specifying how data should be transmitted, routed and recieved at the destination.
Now computers and other devices communicate using IP addresses to identity each other on the internet. An IP address is a unique identifier assigned to each device connected to a network that uses the internet. There are two types of IP addresses but for this article we will focus on the IPv4 (Internet Protocol Version 4), it consists of four numbers seperated by dots e.g 127.8.10.1. Humans will have a hard time memorizing numbers to check the web so the Domain Name System (DNS) was borne. To put it simply DNS translates IP addresses to human readable texts e.g www.example.com translates to 124.58.10.9. The first thing my browser does when i press enter is to translate domain www.google.com to the IP address initiating the DNS query. The DNS query is a recursive event that performs a search to ensure that the domain is translated to the IP address if it is found either in the browser cache or a third party like cloudfare of google ___, otherwise it returns an error message if not found. When the IP address is returned, my web browser needs to establish a connection to Google's server using TCP/IP (remember this is a means of exchanging data right). During the exchange, the data encounters a security software called firewall - this is a device or software that ensures incoming and outgoing traffics are safe based on some predetermined sets of rules and since the website starts with https, the communication between my browser and google's server is encrypted to ensure a safe and private connection. Now at this point my request should reach the load balancer of google, this is a device or service that handles the distrubution of requests to multiple servers to avoid crashing the server and it also ensures a fast response, then the load balancer sends my request to Google's web server to process the http request, if the content i am requesting for is dynamic, my request is then forwarded to the application server to process and engage with the backend. Finally, the application server will need to query a database server, to fetch or store data e.g (user login info) if need be and the response is then sent back to the application server. The processed data is then sent to the web server, which then sends the response to back to my web browser and voila ---https://www.google.com---
Top comments (1)
Very insightful. Keep it up