An introduction to networks
In this section, we’ll dig into networking basics such as terminology and architecture.
An IP address is a unique identifier that is assigned to any machine that is connecting to a network. This identifier helps ensure that traffic is routed correctly. For example, when you send a request to google.com, the web page needs to know who made that request to provide the answer to the correct machine. You can think of an IP address as a home address for your laptop, mobile device, or server. It designates where the request is coming from and where the response needs to go.
Every machine connected to the internet has an IP address, including web servers hosting websites. What we type into a browser and understand to be the domain of the website (www.google.com) is not used by machines to understand the destination. Rather, these human-legible names for sites get converted into IP addresses for the machine to understand where the request is coming...
