[oldgeezr]

Just curious, is there a good site/book/etc to learn how the modern internet actually works? As a lowly programmer, I have a good understanding of network communications, and some knowledge of things like routing protocols, but I'm completely lost when it comes to understanding how the modern internet actually functions. Thanks!

[puzzle]

I'd normally recommend books like Google's SRE one, but at least in this case it glosses over the detail of where GFEs tend to live:

https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/production-envi...

It used to be the case that they were mostly in POPs, but I think that with Maglev (https://research.google.com/pubs/pub44824.html) they can live in core clusters, too. Other Google sources go into more detail, e.g.

https://medium.com/@duhroach/profiling-gcps-load-balancers-9...

https://www.slideshare.net/MichelleHolley1/google-cloud-netw...

Back to your question, I'm not sure there is one good place to look up these things, but presentations/papers by companies like Google and Facebook are probably still your best bet. Stuff coming straight out of GCP teams will be a little more enthusiastic in tone, but that's easy to tune out. :-)

Another good example is Facebook's Ben Maurer and his Fail at Scale talk, which discusses a lot of details that are necessary for modern internet services, such as queuing, session/application-layer congestion control, canarying, advanced monitoring, etc. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2839461

[Famicoman]

Tubes by Andrew Blum does a great job at introducing how the infrastructure is layed put and operates to a certain degree, https://www.amazon.com/Tubes-Journey-Internet-Andrew-Blum/dp...

That said, I would love some more in-depth books on the topic.