Networking Fundamentals

The Network Is the System#

Google serves a search result in under 200 milliseconds. That budget gets carved across DNS resolution, a TCP handshake, TLS negotiation, load balancer hops, and at least one backend RPC. None of those steps are magic. Every one of them has a cost, and the engineers who built that pipeline know those costs down to the microsecond. When interviewers ask "why is this slow?" or "what happens when this service goes down?", they're t...