Networking in the Cloud
Networking becomes even more important when working with Cloud platforms such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and many others!
When Platform Engineers create Cloud infrastructure, they have to decide which resources should be accessible from the internet and which should remain private. This is important for security!! They may configure IP addresses, firewall rules and other networking systems to control who can access each resource.
For example, a website may need to be publicly accessible, while its database should remain private. The application needs to connect to the database, but users on the internet should not be able to access the database directly.
A Platform Engineer would be responsible for helping design and configure this communication securely. If any part of the network is configured incorrectly, the application may be running but still remain unreachable. This can cause a business to lose out on a lot of money, every hour down is an hour not making money!
How Do Applications Use Networks?
Most modern applications contain several parts that need to communicate with each other. The part that the user sees may need to send information to another part of the application, which then stores or retrieves information from a database.
When a user visits a website, their device sends a request across a network to the server running the application. The server receives the request, processes it and sends a response back to the user.
For example, when you log in to a website, your email address and password are sent to the application. The application checks whether the details are correct and then sends a response back to your device.
Every part of this journey relies on networking. If just one part is incorrectly configured, the application might become unavailable even though the application itself is running perfectly.