What happens when you type https://www.holbertonschool.com in your browser and press 'Enter'

We use the internet all the time for all kinds of purposes, and surfing all day has become second nature. So much so that most of the time we are content with knowing that our browser works and does what we are asked to do. What happens under everything the moment we enter a URL in the search bar and the moment we receive the content of the desired page?

Server model.

Server is a term describing the physical machine on which the server program is running. Each website, application, service can have multiple servers working behind the scenes to perform the processes needed by the client(s). In general, physical servers are regrouped in server farms, or data centers.

DNS.

The DNS purpose is to translate domain names like www.holbertonschool.com  into IP addresses, humans aren’t really good at remembering long strings of numbers, so we just assign a name to an IP so that we can remember it easily. In this case, www.holbertonschool.com translates to 17.804.197.29.

TCP/IP.

It’s a set of rules that define how servers and clients interact over the network, and how data should be transferred, broken into packets, received, etc.

The Firewall.

A firewall is a software that sets rules about what can enter or leave a part of a network. In the case of our example, when the browser asks for the website at the address 54.172.4.191, that request has be processed by a firewall which will decide if it’s safe, or if it’s a threat to the server’s security.

HTTPS/SSL.

Now that the browser has the IP address, it is going to take care of the other part of the URL, the https:/ part. HTTPS stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure, and is a secure version of the regular HTTP. This transfer protocol defines different types of requests and responses served to clients and servers over a network. In other terms, it’s the main way to transfer data between a browser and a website. HTTP and HTTPS requests include GET, POST, PUT, and others. The HTTPS requests and responses are encrypted, which ensure the users that their data can’t be stolen or used by third-parties and another key component in securing websites is the SSL certificate. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer . On some browsers and with certain types of SSL certificates, the bar turns green.

Load-balancer.

Load-balancer is to distribute requests to servers using a specific algorithm, it will make decisions on what request goes to each server.

Application server.

These are software programs responsible for operating applications, communicate with databases and manage user information, among other things. they work behind web servers and will be able to serve a dynamic application using the static content from the web server.

Web server.

A web server is a software program that serves static content, like simple HTML pages, images or plain text files for example Nginx or Apache.

Database.

A database is a collection of information in which the end user can access the information in the database to delete or load through the application, we can configure many more databases and link them to the data much faster using multiple servers.

I hope this article has been very useful to you ! .