Networking

Do you ever feel like your network infrastructure is a black box? When I first dove into cloud networking, the term Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) sounded mysterious—like a secret compartment in the sky. Over the years, I’ve come to see a VPC as your custom sandbox inside a public cloud: a private playground built on shared real estate. In this post, we’ll unpack what a VPC really is, how it works under the hood, and why it’s an indispensable tool for any software craftsperson aiming for secure, scalable cloud architecture. ...

Background In my previous role, while working in the Insurance domain, we provided a mobile app to all customers who bought cyber insurance. This had some cool value added services that helped small enterprises check if their employees’ knowledge of cybersecurity is good enough to protect the organization from being compromised. Thus, we implemented a one-click phishing campaign solution, which enabled users to click a button and initiate a phishing campaign for the organization. This was a really fun thing to work on. This was when I invested some time looking into how email really worked. ...

Background I have been wondering how to simplify the concept of handshakes - not the human handshakes; I’m talking about the computer ones, like the ones that happen between a server and a client when establishing a connection over HTTPS. So I went reading online to see if the content was digestible for everyone - including beginners. I couldn’t find a simple diagrammatic representation, so I thought maybe this is my chance to draw them and help others understand it at a glance. To be fair, it isn’t that straightforward to jump into discussing TLS handshakes, without learning about a few key terms. So I am certain that I will update this post with more information later on ...

I was recently helping my friend with some preparation for a system design interview and as we discussed solutions, the terms Proxy server and reverse proxy came up in our discussions. I really struggled to give a simple explanation of the terms during our discussion. I just knew what one did. I did not even know that load balancers were generally reverse proxies. This is where knowledge of a natural language could be helpful. So I thought I would try and compile a simple description of both here and go look at the definition of Proxy from the dictionary. ...