Day 9 of My Cloud Engineering Journey: Learning Networking Basics and DNS

Today I spent time learning networking fundamentals and basic DNS concepts inside Linux.

Out of everything I’ve studied so far, networking probably humbles me the most.

There are a lot of moving pieces involved, and even the “basic” concepts feel deeper than they first appear. I can already tell networking is going to take repeated exposure and practice over time before it fully clicks.

Today I learned about: • switches and routers • IP addresses and subnets • default gateways • routing basics • DNS resolution • network communication between systems

I also spent time learning how Linux handles DNS configurations through files like:

/etc/resolv.conf

and

/etc/hosts

I started understanding how systems translate human-readable names into IP addresses and how DNS servers help centralize that process across larger environments.

One thing that stood out to me was realizing how much networking affects everything else in cloud engineering.

Servers, applications, cloud infrastructure, containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and even simple SSH connections all depend heavily on networking functioning correctly underneath everything else.

I also learned some important networking commands and concepts related to routing tables, interfaces, gateways, and packet forwarding.

The DNS portion was especially interesting because it showed how systems attempt hostname resolution locally first before reaching out to DNS servers depending on configuration order.

Honestly, this topic is definitely harder than it first looks, and I completely understand now why so many people struggle with networking.

This is absolutely one of those areas where one lab is nowhere near enough.

But even though it’s challenging, I’m slowly starting to recognize pieces of the bigger picture connecting together over time.

Tomorrow I’ll be diving into application basics and learning more about technologies like Java, Node.js, and Python to better understand the applications that actually run on top of cloud infrastructure.