Networking for DevOps Roadmap
TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP/TLS, and the troubleshooting toolkit — the networking fundamentals every DevOps engineer needs.
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Models
The conceptual frameworks that make networking make sense.
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Seven layers vs four — and which one actually matters.
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Addressing
IP addresses and how networks are carved up.
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IPv4 classes, public vs private, and CIDR notation.
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Subdividing address space for VPCs and on-prem networks.
- Subnet calculator optional
Plan subnets interactively.
- CIDR checker optional
Verify whether an IP falls inside a CIDR block.
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Name resolution
How hostnames become IP addresses.
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Resolvers, records (A, CNAME, MX, TXT), and TTLs.
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Transport & app
The protocols your services speak.
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Connection-oriented reliability vs low-latency datagrams.
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Request/response, status codes, TLS handshake.
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Edge
Traffic management at the boundary of your infrastructure.
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Round-robin, least-connections, health checks.
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Stateful vs stateless packet filtering.
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Troubleshooting
Diagnose network problems systematically.
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ping, traceroute, dig, ss, tcpdump — when to use which.
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Why this order.
Networking is the layer people skip and then spend years compensating for. It is invisible when it works, which makes it easy to defer — and it is the root cause of a large share of the incidents that get escalated, which makes deferring it expensive.
The order is bottom-up because the abstractions genuinely stack. Addressing and subnets first: CIDR is the notation everything else is written in, from a VPC to a Kubernetes Service range to a firewall rule, and being fluent in it makes cloud networking read as arithmetic rather than incantation.
DNS comes next because it is where a startling proportion of outages actually live, and because "it works by IP but not by name" is only diagnosable if you know what the resolver is doing. HTTP and TLS follow, then load balancing, then the troubleshooting toolkit — `dig`, `ss`, `tcpdump` — which is last only because the tools are most useful once you know what you are looking for.