Naming & Indirection

This lecture discusses the concepts of naming and indirection in computer systems, focusing on how names are used to identify memory locations, objects, and network interfaces. The instructor explains the importance of using names for indirection, such as in the case of IP addresses and DNS names, to enable flexibility, scalability, and fault tolerance in systems. The lecture covers the use of references, hierarchical naming, and the implementation of a global name service with features like scalability through hierarchy, fault tolerance through replication, and eventual consistency. It also explores the challenges of updates, caching, and synchronization in distributed systems.

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Related concepts (26)

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IP address

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing. Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. However, because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP (IPv6), using 128 bits for the IP address, was standardized in 1998.

IPv4 address exhaustion

IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s, when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the Internet.

Domain Name System

The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the Internet or other Internet Protocol (IP) networks. It associates various information with domain names (identification strings) assigned to each of the associated entities. Most prominently, it translates readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols.

Alternative DNS root

The Internet uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to associate numeric computer IP addresses with human-readable names. The top level of the domain name hierarchy, the DNS root, contains the top-level domains that appear as the suffixes of all Internet domain names. The most widely used (and first) DNS root is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In addition, several organizations operate alternative DNS roots, often referred to as alt roots.

IPv6 address

An Internet Protocol Version 6 address (IPv6 address) is a numeric label that is used to identify and locate a network interface of a computer or a network node participating in a computer network using IPv6. IP addresses are included in the packet header to indicate the source and the destination of each packet. The IP address of the destination is used to make decisions about routing IP packets to other networks. IPv6 is the successor to the first addressing infrastructure of the Internet, Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4).