Taking a Step Back
Explore the interplay of networking layers and devices in distributed systems to understand the complexity behind simple data requests. Learn how switches, routers, and hosts handle different protocol layers and why knowing these mechanisms helps in protocol evaluation and troubleshooting. This lesson offers a big-picture view to improve your grasp of network infrastructures in distributed applications.
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Now that we have examined each layer more closely, we should take a step back and look at the big picture.
At this point, we realize how much complexity underlies a seemingly simple request from your web browser to Google and how many moving parts are involved in this transfer. Of course, the same applies to most distributed systems nowadays since they work on top of the same or a similar network infrastructure.
The following illustration shows an example of a big ...