Being in an African woman in a predominantly male field has made me overly critical of my understanding of technology concepts due to the constant scrutiny or requirement to be perfect at everything to show you belong. So as a survivor tool kit I banished myself to live in the shadows. However this year's Women's history month has pushed me to do all things that make my knees shake. Hence publishing this first piece of technical writing that I did as part of my ALX software engineering program. Happy reading.

I must admit this question can be a complex one to answer because of the various processes involved. And depending on your audience, trying to explain it in a way easily understood by them. In this post I will focus on the answer as it relates to DNS request, TCP/IP, Firewall, HTTPS/SSL, Load-balancer, Web server, Application server and Databases.

When a user types https://www.google.com and presses “Enter”. The first thing that happens is an https request is sent through the internet using TCP/IP protocol to the DNS server of the google.com domain. As the request moves through the internet it is encrypted by being wrapped in a HTTP/SSL format. Once the DNS server translates the domain name to a matching IP address that matches the domain name. It is the load balancer job to take over and direct this request over to the web server (which is made up of an Application server that contains the files that contain code bases) that is also connected to the database that stores the data for the google.com domain. First it terminates the SSL certificate of the request so that the request is in now in http format then passes the request to the appropriate web server. But before it passes it to the web server, the request meets a firewall that acts as a shield to protect/monitor traffic of http requests going to the web servers.

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