Internet Computing
Ali Sunyaev · 2024
The Internet continues its success story as its profound impact on individuals, businesses, and the broader society keeps growing-with no end in sight.Its significance is evident whenever we consider how it keeps transforming virtually every facet of our lives, including communication, information access, leisure activities, working, and many more.Critical social conversations, such as questions surrounding sustainable living and the climate crisis, now largely happen online, thanks to the Internet's capacity to facilitate wide-reaching and democratic dialogues on social media platforms.Since I have published the first edition of this book in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has largely transformed how people work in many industry sectors.While some major companies have asked their employees to fully return to the office, hybrid models combining days at the office and days working from home have become the new normal (e.g., according to a 2023 study of the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research around 80% of employees in IT-related jobs in Germany work partly or fully from home).With the advancement of extended reality technologies and artificial intelligence, some even argue that we are on the verge of an inevitable fusion of physical and virtual realities (i.e., the Metaverse), which could have implications on our private, professional, and societal lives beyond our current imagination.All these developments would be inconceivable without the Internet and its rich landscape of available applications.While the demand for using Internet-based applications keeps increasing, the Internet landscape including its architectural and technological foundation is still evolving steadily and becoming increasingly complex.At the same time, we keep seeing discussions about whether the Internet has been designed "correctly" and how we should possibly redesign its fundamental architectural and technological principles in order to guarantee privacy and informational self-determination for everyone in the future.It is therefore more important than ever that students and young professionals in IT-related fields familiarize themselves with the Internet's basic mechanisms and are introduced to the most promising Internet-related architectures and technologies of our time.This book aims to offer a deep understanding of key ideas associated with the Internet.While it would not be expedient to touch upon every aspect of Internet vi computing within one book, the primary objective is to give a comprehensive introduction to the fundamental principles and highlight the most exciting contemporary shifts in applications, architectures, and technologies.The idea for this book was originally raised during discussions with my postdoctoral researchers and PhD students at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).While searching for a well-known and respected textbook on Internet computing for one of our lectures, we were surprised to find that no such work existed.Consequently, I decided to write it.In the first edition of this book, I have put a special emphasis on historical developments in architectures and technologies.After we used the first edition for about four years in teaching undergraduate students at KIT, we have recently witnessed some developments (e.g., the rise of the InterPlanetary File System) that have led us to decide to write a revised version.For the second edition of this book, I decided to focus more on contemporary developments and use less space for describing historical developments in technologies such as Web services and middleware.The second edition is divided into 11 chapters, which, as a whole, offer a comprehensive lecture on the foundations of Internet computing.Each individual chapter can be used as a distinct lecture unit.
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