Networking and Kubernetes

Chapter 1. Networking Introduction

“Guilty until proven innocent.” That’s the mantra of networks and the engineers who supervise them. In this opening chapter, we will wade through the development of networking technologies and standards, give a brief overview of the dominant theory of networking, and introduce our Golang web server that will be the basis of the networking examples in Kubernetes and the cloud throughout the book.

Let’s begin…at the beginning.

Networking History

The internet we know today is vast, with cables spanning oceans and mountains and connecting cities with lower latency than ever before. Barrett Lyon’s “Mapping the Internet,” shown in Figure 1-1, shows just how vast it truly is. That image illustrates all the connections between the networks of networks that make up the internet. The purpose of a network is to exchange information from one system to another system. That is an enormous ask of a distributed global system, but the internet was not always global; it started as a conceptual model and slowly was built up over time, to the behemoth in Lyon’s visually stunning artwork. There are many factors to consider when learning about networking, such as the last mile, the connectivity between a customer’s home and their internet service provider’s network—all the way to scaling up to the geopolitical landscape of the internet. The internet is integrated into the fabric of our society. In this book, we will discuss how networks operate and how Kubernetes ...