No matter what we’re doing - chatting, video streaming, gaming, surfing, buying stuff - it’s essentially an exchange of data packets between two computers (networks).

If we want to get fancy, we can divide the network into layers as per the OSI model, but all said and done, we’re always, always dealing with TCP/IP protocols (warning, heavy reading ahead!), pings, routers, all of which have one goal in common - transmission of data packets. What started as simple CGI scripts written in Perl has now bloomed into clustered deployments running fully automated on Kubernetes and other orchestration frameworks (sorry for the heavy jargon - I’m not making it up at all it’s just the way things are these days!).īut I can’t help but smile at the thought that the fundamentals are still the same as they were in the 1970s.Īll we have is abstractions upon abstractions supported by hard, physical cables that form the network (okay, there are virtual networks are well, but you get the idea). In many ways, the landscape for digital businesses has seen a revolution or two.

Network packet analyzer