12 Networking Fundamentals Every Engineer Should Know

Networking fundamentals are explained through the evolution of a fictional travel booking website from a single server to a complex cloud system. The content covers IP addresses and DNS for device identification, ports for application routing, subnets and routing for network segmentation, firewalls for security, and NAT for private-to-public address translation. It then progresses to cloud concepts like VPCs, containerization with Docker including bridge and overlay networks, and Kubernetes orchestration with pods, services, and ingress. The core principle is that fundamental networking concepts remain constant across physical servers, cloud infrastructure, containers, and orchestration platforms, even as the tools evolve.