By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Imagine trying to call someone without knowing their phone number.
Imagine sending a package without knowing the recipient's address.
Imagine a company where every employee worked in complete isolation with no way to communicate.
That is exactly what computers would be like without networking.
A computer, no matter how powerful, becomes significantly more useful when it can communicate with other computers. Networking provides the rules, technologies, and infrastructure that make this communication possible. It allows devices to exchange information, share resources, and collaborate across local offices, data centers, cloud environments, and even the entire internet.
Today, nearly every digital service depends on networking. When you browse a website, stream a video, send an email, deploy an application to AWS, or connect to a Kubernetes cluster, networking is working behind the scenes to move data from one system to another.
For DevOps engineers, networking is not an optional skill. Modern applications are distributed across multiple servers, containers, databases, and cloud services. Understanding how these components communicate is essential for building reliable, scalable, and secure systems.
A computer network is a collection of two or more devices connected together so they can communicate and exchange data using agreed-upon communication protocols.
These devices can include: