What Happens When You Type https://www.google.com In Your Browser and Press Enter

The above is a very important subject everyone must care to know especially when you are in the software engineering business. I hope to communicate the very important stuffs to you as this question is a very broad one. What happens behind the scenes entails a lot. For now, let’s basically focus on the following topics – (DNS request, TCP/IP, Firewall, HTTPS/SSL, Load-balancer, Web server, Application server, Database).

Let’s dig in …

WEB SERVER

The content of a website, such as text, photographs, video, and application data, is stored and sent by a web server to clients who request it. A web browser program is the most prevalent sort of client, and it requests data from your website when a user clicks on a link or downloads a document from a page displayed in the browser.

Websites are collections of files, often HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images, that tell your browser how to display the site, images, and data.

DNS

When we point our browser to a URL like https://www.google.com, our browser has to figure out which server on the Internet is hosting the site. It looks up the domain, google.com, to find the address. Every device on the Internet — mobile phone, smart watch, computer — all have a unique address called an IP address. The domain name system, or DNS, is like the Contacts app on our phone. It helps our browser find servers on the Internet. DNS does a lookup of the server hosting the website at various places across the Internet. IP addresses are important because they identify a computer or source, just like your postal address identifies where you live.

TCP/IP

When the browser gets the DNS record with the IP address, it finds the server on the Internet and establishes a connection. The connection established between the browser and server is TCP, Transmission Control Protocol, connection. If HTTPS is being used, a TLS handshake takes place to secure the communication. The IP, internet protocol, is used to communicate over the network. 

FIREWALL

The firewall helps protect our network by filtering traffic and blocking outsiders from gaining unauthorized access to the private data on the computer. It can also help block malicious software from infecting the computer.

A firewalled system analyzes network traffic based on rules. The firewall only welcomes those incoming connections that it has been configured to accept. It does this by allowing or blocking specific data packets — units of communication you send over digital networks — based on pre-established security rules.

A firewall works like a traffic guard at your computer’s entry point, or port. Only trusted sources, or IP addresses, are allowed in. 

HTTPS/SSL

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it keeps the internet connection secure and safeguards any sensitive data that is being sent between two systems (server and client (browser)), thus preventing criminals from reading and modifying any information transferred, including potential personal details. It does this by making sure that any data transferred between users and sites, or between the server and browser remain impossible to read. It uses encryption algorithms to scramble data in transit, preventing hackers from reading it as it is sent over the connection.

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) secures the computer network communication on the internet.

LOAD-BALANCER

The load balancer will distribute the network or application traffic across multiple servers by acting as a reverse proxy. It boosts application performance by relieving servers of a load of monitoring and maintaining application and network sessions, as well as by executing application-specific activities.

Application servers are specifically designed to run or host applications (web applications, hypervisor, etc.).

DATABASE

Usually, most websites hold a lot of data of users and database is needed to store and organize the information of the users. A DBMS is needed to serve as an interface between the end-user and the database, allowing users to create, read, update, and delete data in the database.

Written by Joseph Aboagye
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