Architecture: Zscaler

You open your laptop at home, connect to the company network, and almost immediately a login prompt appears asking you to authenticate — again. Or a website you could access at the office is suddenly blocked. Or your IT team says "it goes through Zscaler" when you ask why something is slow. Zscaler is one of those pieces of infrastructure that affects every developer every day, but almost nobody understands how it actually works. This p… Read More

Explained: STUN Protocol

You're on a video call. The connection is direct — low latency, no relay, no server in the middle eating your bandwidth. Yet both you and the person you're talking to are behind routers, on private networks, with addresses the internet has never heard of. How did your browser find the other person? The answer, almost certainly, involved STUN . It ran silently in the background before the call even connected, took a fraction of a second,… Read More

Explained: NAT

Your laptop is sitting on a home network. It has an IP address — something like 192.168.1.42 . But that address means nothing to the rest of the internet. It's a private address, invisible beyond your router. And yet, you can open a browser, load a webpage hosted on a server in another country, and the response comes back to exactly the right device, on exactly the right tab. How? The answer is NAT — Network Address Translation. It's on… Read More