Basics of IP Networking

This lesson will introduce the most fundamental concepts of Internet Protocol (IP) networking so we can apply them in the next lesson on AWS networking resources.

IPv4 addresses

As mentioned in the introduction to this course, we’ll only work with IPv4 in this course.

IPv4 stands for “Internet Protocol Version 4” and is still the most widely used IP version. IPv6 is a newer version of the IP, but it introduces a few changes that make it quite different compared to version 4. AWS supports both versions for most of its services. To keep it simple, this course focuses on IPv4.

Note: We will work exclusively with IPv4 in this course, so every time an IP address is mentioned, consider it to be an IPv4 address.

What is an IPv4 address and what does it look like?

Examples:

• 192.168.1.1
• 192.168.0.213
• 23.243.42.3
• 99.120.341.20

These are all IPv4 addresses. An IPv4 address consists of 4 bytes (represented above with numbers from 0–255 for each byte). Therefore, the easiest way to write an IPv4 address is to write its 4 bytes as numbers separated by a dot.