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What is Domain Name System (DNS)?
Posted: May 14th, 2018
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical decentralized naming system for computers, services, or other resources connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities. Most prominently, it translates more readily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for locating and identifying computer services and devices with the underlying network protocols. By providing a worldwide, distributed directory service, the Domain Name System is an essential component of the functionality on the Internet, that has been in use since 1985.
The Domain Name System delegates the responsibility of assigning domain names and mapping those names to Internet resources by designating authoritative name servers for each domain. Network administrators may delegate authority over sub-domains of their allocated name space to other name servers. This mechanism provides distributed and fault tolerant service and was designed to avoid a single large central database.
The Domain Name System also specifies the technical functionality of the database service that is at its core. It defines the DNS protocol, a detailed specification of the data structures and data communication exchanges used in the DNS, as part of the Internet Protocol Suite.
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DNS resembles a global telephone directory, except that rather than look up the phone number and dial it as you do with your "landline" phone or cell phone, you simply type into your "phone" (your Web browser) the name of the party you're trying to contact, and the party is contacted automatically. DNS is useful because it's much easier to remember a name like www.davidthegeek.blogspot.com than an address like 192.168.100.5.
Although DNS seems like a big phone book full of names and IP addresses, it's much more complex than that. It's laid out in a hierarchical manner, for two reasons: It removes the requirement to have either one large directory that everyone uses or to have every directory contain every DNS name and IP address in existence. Instead, a large number of DNS servers exist; they're distributed and then queried only for the addresses they contain. If a DNS server houses the zone for a certain domain, it's known as authoritative for that domain.
On the Internet, the Domain Name System (DNS) associates various sorts of information with so-called domain names; most importantly, it serves as the "phone book" for the Internet: it translates human-readable computer hostnames, e.g. kektech.net, into the IP addresses that networking equipment needs for delivering information. It also stores other information such as the list of mail exchange servers that accept email for a given domain. In providing a worldwide keyword-based redirection service, the Domain Name System is an essential component of contemporary Internet use.
Article sourced from Wikipedia.org and Yahoo.com