You're reading from System Design Guide for Software Professionals Build scalable solutions – from fundamental concepts to cracking top tech company interviews

Product type Paperback

Published in Aug 2024

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781805124993

Length 384 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Concepts

Application Development

Authors (2):

Dhirendra Sinha

Tejas Chopra

View More author details

Table of Contents (21) Chapters

Preface

1. Part 1: Foundations of System Design

2. Chapter 1: Basics of System Design FREE CHAPTER

3. Chapter 2: Distributed System Attributes

4. Chapter 3: Distributed Systems Theorems and Data Structures

5. Part 2: Core Components of Distributed Systems

6. Chapter 4: Distributed Systems Building Blocks: DNS, Load Balancers, and Application Gateways

7. Chapter 5: Design and Implementation of System Components –Databases and Storage

8. Chapter 6: Distributed Cache

9. Chapter 7: Pub/Sub and Distributed Queues

10. Part 3: System Design in Practice

11. Chapter 8: Design and Implementation of System Components: API, Security, and Metrics

12. Chapter 9: System Design – URL Shortener

13. Chapter 10: System Design – Proximity Service

14. Chapter 11: Designing a Service Like Twitter

15. Chapter 12: Designing a Service Like Instagram

16. Chapter 13: Designing a Service Like Google Docs

17. Chapter 14: Designing a Service Like Netflix

18. Chapter 15: Tips for Interviewees

19. Chapter 16: System Design Cheat Sheet

20. Index

Exploring DNS

The DNS maps human-friendly domain names to machine-readable IP addresses. It provides the translation service between domain names and IP addresses. When a user enters a domain name in the browser, the browser needs to find the corresponding IP address to complete the request. It does this by querying the DNS infrastructure. The DNS works transparently in the background. Users are unaware of the domain name to IP mapping performed by DNS. When the browser obtains the IP address from DNS, it forwards the user’s request to the destination web server at that IP address.

In short, DNS performs the crucial function of translating domain names that users type into their browsers to IP addresses that computers use to locate websites and resources. This translation is performed seamlessly, allowing users to access websites using easy-to-remember names. This is shown in Figure 4.1.