Portfolio · Networking Fundamentals

The Life of a Request

TCP · TLS 1.3 · L4/L7 · gRPC · Performance Bottlenecks

Zone 01

WAN & Edge

💻

Client

Browser / Mobile

🌐

DNS

Route 53 / Cloudflare
UDP:53 lookup

🛡️

CDN / WAF

Edge PoP
TLS 1.3 termination

HTTP/2
Keep-Alive

Zone 02

VPC Ingress
L4 / L7

⚖️

L4/L7 Load Balancer

TLS Termination
ALB / HAProxy / Nginx

⚠️ Ephemeral Port
Exhaustion

Watch: source ports
TIME_WAIT buildup

gRPC / TCP
Routing & NAT

Zone 03

Internal Service Mesh
LAN

☸ Kubernetes Cluster

🔐

Auth Service

Pod · TCP:8080

🔌

API Service

Pod · TCP:3000

⚙️

Worker Service

Pod · TCP:9000

TCP
Conn Pool

Zone 04

Data
Persistence

🐘

PostgreSQL

Primary + Replica
TCP:5432

⚡

Redis

Cache / Session
TCP:6379

UDP:53 DNS

TCP SYN/ACK + TLS 1.3

HTTP/2 Keep-Alive

gRPC / TCP

TCP Connection Pool

⚠ Port Exhaustion