Introduction to Domain Name System (DNS)
Learn how domain names get translated to IP addresses through DNS.
We'll cover the following
The origins of DNS#
Let’s consider the example of a mobile phone where a unique number is associated with each user. To make calls to friends, we can initially try to memorize some of the phone numbers. However, as the number of contacts grows, we’ll have to use a phone book to keep track of all our contacts. This way, whenever we need to make a call, we’ll refer to the phone book and dial the number we need.
Similarly, computers are uniquely identified by IP addresses—for example, 104.18.2.119 is an IP address. We use IP addresses to visit a website hosted on a machine. Since humans cannot easily remember IP addresses to visit domain names (an example domain name being educative.io), we need a phone book-like repository that can maintain all mappings of domain names to IP addresses. In this chapter, we’ll see how DNS serves as the Internet’s phone book.
What is DNS?#
The domain name system (DNS) is the Internet’s naming service that maps human-friendly domain names to machine-readable IP addresses. The service of DNS is transparent to users. When a user enters a domain name in the browser, the browser has to translate the domain name to IP address by asking the DNS infrastructure. Once the desired IP address is obtained, the user’s request is forwarded to the destination web server.
The slides below show the high-level flow of the working of DNS:
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