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The Core Technologies of the Web

Make sure to check out this Internet 101 video series by Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/internet-intro/internet-works-intro/v/what-is-the-internet

What is TCP?

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is a standard that defines how to establish and maintain a network conversation via which application programs can exchange data. TCP works with the Internet Protocol (IP), which defines how computers send and recieve packets of data. Together, TCP and IP are the basic rules defining the Internet. TCP is defined by the IETF in the Request for Comment (RFC) standards document number 793.

TCP is a connection-oriented protocol, which means a connection is established and maintained until the application programs at each end have finished exchanging messages.

What is UDP?

UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is an alternative communications protocol to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) used primarily for establishing low-latency and loss-tolerating connections between applications on the internet.

Source: https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com

What is HTTP?

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol — HTTP is a data transport protocol built on TCP. Although TCP is soon to be replaced with UDP in HTTP3.

Communication between client and web servers is done by sending HTTP Requests and receiving HTTP Responses

There is a big gap in development from HTTP/1.1 (released in 1999) to the release of HTTP/2 (released in 2015); things are heating up with the release of HTTP/3 due in 2019.

HTTP/3 is an evolution of Google’s QUIC & HTTP

Services will recognize, just as Google did with QUIC, that the web is severely outdated. Inefficient technologies are eating into their bottom line at an alarming rate.

HTTP3 is a last ditch effort to keep the web running and will buy us time to come up with better solutions.

DNS — Domain Nam Service

HTTP costs companies time and money but that’s not the only problem. DNS has room to drastically speed up the efficiency of connections.

In today’s web, a client must have visited a website before it could establish a 0-RTT connection during their next visit. Our DIS provides cryptographic parameters in addition to traditional routing information in the form of a verifiable certificate. The DIS can return all this required data at a single point in time to establish a 0-RTT connection to the origin service. This simple feature reduces resource requirements. It’s the small things, that when implemented on a large scale, have drastic effects on network congestion, performance, overhead, user experience, and costs.

DNS (Domain Name System) is the phonebook of the Internet. Humans access information online through domain names, like sentivate.com or google.com. Web browsers establish communication through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so that browsers can load content and resources.

How Sentivate is addressing HTTP and DNS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuBrQWPM5OI

To solve these core issues we must build smart replacement technology not additive. Adopting a new Web doesn’t take sophisticated hardware as the mentioned core issues are all software.