What Happens to that URL…
With technology as an interval part of our everyday life, many, if not all of us, take the the seemingly simple task of punching in a web address and being directed to the corresponding site without a second thought. But there are so steps that take place between a user typing in an URL and being redirected to to the site, all with in a second. Allow me to explain.
Lets say you type https://www.holbertonschool.cominto the web browser of your choosing. When you type this the domain name will be checked against a Domain Name Server. The Domain Name Server or DNS is going to see if the web address you entered, corresponds to an IP address.
Domain names represent IP addresses, but IP is not the only type of protocol use by the Internet. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), also contains other types of protocols. It’s a set of rules that define how servers and clients interact over the network, and how data should be transferred, broken into packets, and received. These requests may encounter a firewall.
To protect themselves from hackers and or attacks, servers are often equipped with a firewall. The firewall is a software that decides what can enter or leave a part of a network. that request has to be processed by a firewall which will decide if it’s safe, or if it’s a threat.
The URL we enter has https prefix, which means it will first contact the load balancer of the website. The load balancer is put in place to distribute the incoming traffic of an any requests. The load balancer has a firewall, and once our request is not deemed a threat we will be directed to a server, after verifying a SSL certificate, that is hosting the site the requested.
Once we have reached this point, the web server and application server work in conjunction with each other, and database to send and retrieve static and dynamic files in order to display the webpage you requested.
I know that this seems like there is a lot going on while you type in a simple URL to access a page, and the truth is that there is. The internet and the infrastructure that it relies on is incredible. And while all of these steps can be explored in far more detail, this is the short and sweet of it, and it all takes place in the blink of an eye. Happy Searching…
