Beneath the Surface: Why Network Fundamentals Matter in DevOps and Platform Engineering
A funny thing happens in DevOps and platform engineering: we spend our days building out automation pipelines, tuning Kubernetes clusters, and provisioning infrastructure at the push of a button—yet many of us still treat networking like some obscure art that belongs to another team.
It’s understandable. Networking can feel low-level and intimidating, a realm filled with acronyms like ARP, BGP, and CIDR blocks, IP addressing schemas, and the dreaded firewall misconfiguration. But here’s the truth: without a foundational understanding of networking, you’re flying blind. You may be able to spin up an app, but you’ll struggle to debug it when it can’t talk to its database. You can provision all the infrastructure in the world, but it won’t matter if your DNS isn’t resolving correctly or packets aren’t flowing where they should.
DevOps isn’t just about CI/CD and Terraform—it’s about delivering software reliably. And you can’t be reliable if you don’t understand the pipes under your platform.
The Invisible Plumbing of the Platform
At its core, networking is the circulatory system of your infrastructure. It connects everything—your apps, services, storage, monitoring systems, third-party APIs, users, and even your developers themselves.
A misconfigured security group, a missing route in a VPC table, or a load balancer pointing to the wrong subnet can bring your entire platform to its knees. And here’s the kicker: when something goes wrong, the signs aren’t always obvious. A database connection timeout could be a misconfigured port, an NGINX 502 might trace back to a bad DNS record, and an intermittent outage could be the result of asymmetric routing or an IP conflict buried deep in the weeds.
If you know the basics—subnetting, routing, firewall rules, NAT, and how DNS resolution actually works—you can cut through the noise. You stop guessing and start tracing.
Real-World Chaos: The Platform Team’s Reality
Let me paint a picture. You’re on-call. An alert goes off. A service can’t talk to another one. It’s critical. You log into the cluster and confirm the pods are up. The services look healthy. You test connectivity—and it fails.
If you know TCP/IP, you might run a traceroute, check your IP tables, validate security group rules, confirm which ports are open, and trace DNS lookups. You think like a network packet, following it hop by hop until you find where it gets dropped.
Without that knowledge, you’re stuck restarting pods and praying something magically fixes itself. That’s not engineering—that’s superstition.
A Layered Approach to Ownership
Modern platforms are built with abstraction after abstraction. Cloud providers make it easy to forget about the gritty internals—until something breaks. That’s when abstractions leak and someone needs to peel back the layers.
You don’t need to be a CCNA-certified expert to be effective. But knowing the basics—how TCP handshakes work, how IP addresses get assigned, how traffic routes between private and public subnets—gives you the clarity and confidence to troubleshoot like a pro.
It also makes your automation smarter. When writing infrastructure-as-code, you’ll know why it matters that your application subnets are spread across availability zones, or why NAT gateways belong in public subnets, not private ones. When deploying a service mesh, you’ll understand what happens to L4 and L7 traffic. When configuring firewalls, you’ll know why ingress and egress rules both matter.
Tools Are Not Enough Without the Foundation
We have incredible tools: VPC flow logs, security group visualizers, packet captures, performance monitors, distributed tracing systems. But tools are only as good as the person interpreting them. A packet trace filled with SYNs and no ACKs means nothing if you don’t understand what that handshake is trying to do.
As DevOps engineers, we often own the pipelines, the provisioning scripts, the CI/CD tooling. But the responsibility doesn’t stop there. We’re also the de facto stewards of reliability and performance. That means knowing what’s happening beneath the surface.
Learning Networking Doesn’t Have to Suck
The good news? Networking doesn’t have to be intimidating. Learn by doing. Spin up a small lab in your cloud environment. Use tools like tcpdump, wireshark, or dig. Break things on purpose—then fix them. Visualize network flows using diagrams or whiteboards. Read up on the OSI model, subnetting, and DNS resolution chains.
Start with what’s around you: how does traffic flow from your laptop to a dev environment? What happens when you curl a service inside your Kubernetes cluster? How does your cloud provider route traffic between AZs or VPCs?
Treat networking like the adventure it is—an exploration of what makes the internet work under the hood of your app.
The Takeaway
If you want to be more than a script-runner—if you want to build platforms that are resilient, observable, and scalable—understanding networking is essential. It’s not optional. It’s not someone else’s problem.
You don’t need to become a network engineer. But you do need to know how the pipes connect, how the traffic flows, and how to trace a request from client to container and back again.
Because when you know the network, you don’t just build infrastructure. You build systems that work—and you know why they work.
