Domain Name System (DNS) - System Design Concept

Thirty years ago, when the Internet was still in its infancy when you wanted to visit a website you had to know the IP address of that site. That’s because computers are and were only able to communicate using numbers.

This is an IP address: 127.33.54.200.

It’s long, hard to remember, and we (humans, I presume) are not robots. We needed a way to translate computer-readable information into human-readable. And it had to be fast, lightweight, and scalable.

In the early 1980s, Paul Mockapetris came up with a system that automatically mapped IP addresses to domain names.. and the DNS was born. This same system still serves as the backbone of the modern Internet, today.

The Domain Name System (or DNS) converts human-readable domain names (like www.google.com) into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses (like 173.194.39.78).

Computers can only communicate using series of numbers, so DNS was developed as a sort of “phone book” that translates the domain you enter in your browser into a computer-readable IP.