Networking

Not the meeting people kind of networking - the kind where you send messages over the internet. Although I suppose people meet each other that way too.

For the last few months my team has been unravelling some fairly knotty Terraform, most related to AWS networking - VPCs, subnets, security groups, and of course the odd bit of DNS wrangling. There’s so much to learn about this topic: where do you start?

A great primer is Julia Evans’ excellent Networking Zine, which explains (in just the right amount of detail) all those awful networking acronyms: HTTP, DNS, TCP, CIDR, SSL. The main reason I’ve written this blog post is to share this more widely, as it’s so useful.

After a few years of working on an infrastructure team, I feel like I’ve finally got a handle on all of these terms, and can keep them straight in my mind without looking them up. Just in time for everyone to ditch TCP completely and move onto HTTP3/QUIC!