Why is DNS important in computer networking?

What is the difference between DNS and IP address?

DNS is the way of resolving an IP address to an domain name.

It's basically an extension of the Domain Name System that works by sending out query requests and receiving answers back. The DNS name is essentially a phonebook for websites.

IP address are just numbers that can be used as internet addresses to identify your computer or other device. It doesn't necessarily even mean anything, but it's a way to identify and locate a device in the internet. It's often associated with IPV4 (Internet Protocol version 4), which is the standard version of internet protocol that was used for much of the internet during the '90s and early 2000s.

DNS is a database of domain names. IP is a value assigned to every host on the internet to indicate its location. For example: 1 is a DNS name (the 10.1 hosts are a part of the DNS database) 168.3.1 is an IP address (the 192.1 hosts are a part of the IP address database)
DNS is typically associated with domain names while IP is usually associated with local network addresses. IP addresses are associated with a device (or a group of devices). DNS addresses are associated with a hostname.

Why is DNS important in computer networking?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This article is about the field of computer networking. For the Internet service provider, see Domain Name System (DNS).

Introduction. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a mechanism that provides for the routing of Internet domain names to IP addresses. How DNS works. A DNS server maintains a database of records containing the mappings from names to IP addresses. To obtain the IP address of a hostname, the client sends a request to the DNS server. This request contains the hostname and optionally one or more "resource records", which describe the resource record itself and provide additional information that may be required for the query to be successful.

If the DNS server has an entry for the hostname, it returns a response containing the IP address. If the server does not have an entry for the hostname, it can either return a "not found" response, or return a "server failure" response containing a list of suggested hostnames and IP addresses. The list of suggested hostnames is called a "cache record", because the cache server is essentially checking if it has any information about the hostname; the client does not necessarily need to send the same query to the same server.

In the basic case, the client obtains the IP address by following the reverse mapping (from IP to hostname) contained in the database. Because of the way DNS operates, however, this requires the client to know the IP address in advance. In practice, therefore, most clients use a domain name server which stores a more complete set of mappings.

The most important function of the DNS system is providing the mapping from the hostname (user-friendly name for an Internet host or server) to the IP address of that host. This means that the user-friendly name corresponds to a machine that resides at a particular location and is identified by a number assigned to it, which is its IP address. When users type a domain name into a browser, such as the DNS system routes them to the IP address of the server which supports the path. This process is illustrated in the diagram to the right.