Networking Foundations Workshop

A practical guide to the foundations of modern networking.

The goal of this workshop is to enable the audience to identify and design networking solutions at several levels in the OSI stack.

This track demonstrates how to:

• Gather basic networking information at the node level.
• Analyze and construct physical and virtual local networks.
• Interact with public standards such as DNS and HTTP
• Layer and Inject sophisticated software solutions for resiliency, security, dynamism, etc.
• Understand how networking is applied to containers and their orchestration.

Networking is the foundational fabric that allows for various computers, servers and everything in between to communicate, exchange data and information: understanding how data moves is critical. As many microservices are built and deployed onto container systems like Kubernetes, it’s sometimes challenging to understand where traffic goes, how we communicate with our applications, how we decipher network protocols and the various messaging that could be present. Many understand that a network is always going to be there but, how do we understand it better and interact with or modify it to our need?

In this workshop, participants will take a hands-on approach to understanding Networking Foundations from the ground up using the OSI Model as a framework to understand network communications. Participants will explore  networking concepts in depth and leverage the various core layers of the OSI Model. Participants will interact with protocols and tools, such as:

• The OSI Model
• IP Networking and Subnetting
• Routing and BGP
• DNS and Dig
• HTTP and cURL
• Load Balancing, Proxies, and Firewalls and finally
• Container Networking
• Kubernetes Networking