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Q3 How Does the Cloud Work? 219
Public IP Addresses and Domain Names

IP addresses have two formats. The most common form, called IPv4, has a four-decimal dotted
notation such as 165.193.123.253; the second, called IPv6, has a longer format and will not con-
cern us here. In your browser, if you enter http://165.193.140.14, your browser will connect with
the device on the public Internet that has been assigned to this address.
Nobody wants to type IP addresses such as http://165.193.140.14 to find a particular site.
Instead, we want to enter names such as www.pandora.com or www.woot.com or www.pearson-
highered.com. To facilitate that desire, ICANN administers a system for assigning names to IP
addresses. First, a domain name is a worldwide-unique name that is affiliated with a public IP
address. When an organization or individual wants to register a domain name, it goes to a com-
pany that applies to an ICANN-approved agency to do so. Go Daddy (www.godaddy.com) is an
example of such a company (Figure 6-8).
Go Daddy, or a similar agency, will first determine if the desired name is unique worldwide.
If so, then it will apply to register that name to the applicant. Once the registration is completed,
the applicant can affiliate a public IP address with the domain name. From that point onward,
traffic for the new domain name will be routed to the affiliated IP address.
Note two important points: First, several (or many) domain names can point to the same
IP address. Second, the affiliation of domain names with IP addresses is dynamic. The owner of
the domain name can change the affiliated IP addresses at its discretion.
In 2014, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it was giving up oversight over
ICANN. Critics worry that less-free countries will now try to force ICANN to disallow domain
names for dissident groups, thereby kicking them off the Internet. At this point, it’s still unclear
how ICANN will be governed.
Before we leave addressing, you need to know one more term. A URL (Uniform Resource
Locator) is an address on the Internet. Commonly, it consists of a protocol (such as http:// or
ftp://) followed by a domain name or public IP address. A URL is actually quite a bit more
complicated than this description, but that detailed knowledge is beyond the scope of this
text, so we’ll hurry along. The preferred pronunciation of URL is to say the letters U, R, L.

Processing on a Web Server

At this point, you know basic networking terms and have a high-level view of how the Internet
works. To understand the value of the cloud, and how it works and how your organization
can use it, you need to know a bit about the processing that occurs on a Web server. For this

Figure 6-8
Go Daddy Screenshot
Source: © 2013 Go Daddy Operating
Company, LLC. All rights reserved.