Networking Essentials

Least privilege is the principle that every user, process and system should hold only the access required for its current task, and no more.

A firewall is a control that allows or blocks network traffic according to rules about its source, destination, protocol and, in modern forms, its content and the application it belongs to.

A virtual private network carries traffic through an encrypted tunnel over a public network so that a remote device or site behaves as though it were connected to a private one.

Network address translation rewrites the addresses and ports in packets as they cross a network boundary, most commonly so that many devices with private addresses can share one public address to reach the internet.

DHCP is the protocol by which a device joining a network asks for and receives an address, a subnet mask, a default gateway and DNS servers from a server, for a limited lease period, so that nobody has to configure addresses by hand.

A wireless LAN connects devices to a network over radio using the 802.11 family of standards, through access points that bridge the wireless medium onto the wired network and enforce the authentication and encryption that the shared airwaves demand.

Caching keeps the result of expensive work, such as a rendered page or a database query, and serves that stored copy until it expires, making it the largest single source of speed on any busy website.

Uptime is the proportion of time a service answers requests, quoted in nines, and a service level agreement is the contract clause setting out how that proportion is counted and what the provider owes when it falls short.

Kubernetes is an open-source system that runs containers across a cluster of machines, keeping the number and placement of running copies matched to a declared desired state, and restarting, rescheduling and scaling them without a person intervening.