Ports, Protocols & DevOps Panic: A Fun Survival Guide 🔥
Vaibhav SinghHey there, fellow DevOps warrior! 🐧
If you’ve ever found yourself staring at firewall rules or a netstat output like it’s a cryptic scroll from the DevOps gods, you’re not alone. Today, let’s break down the most commonly used protocols and port numbers in our DevOps workflows — without boring you to death.
In fact, I’ll even drop in some memes to keep you sane. Let’s dive in! 🌊
🎯 Why Should You Care About Protocols & Ports?
Imagine deploying your shiny new app, and… nothing works. It’s either blocked by a firewall, DNS is borked, or your SSH key has ghosted you.
Knowing your protocols and their ports is DevOps survival 101.
🔥 The MVPs of DevOps Protocols & Their Ports
| Protocol | Port Number | Use Case in DevOps |
| HTTP | 80 | Used for basic web traffic and health checks. Not secure, but still found in internal services. |
| HTTPS | 443 | Secure web traffic — must-have for production apps. |
| SSH | 22 | Secure shell — your gateway to remote servers and CI/CD agents. |
| FTP | 21 | Old-school file transfer. Not recommended without SFTP (port 22). |
| DNS | 53 | Resolves domain names to IPs. No DNS, no site. |
| SMTP | 25, 587 | For sending emails (think alerting systems). |
| MySQL | 3306 | Default port for MySQL/MariaDB databases. |
| PostgreSQL | 5432 | Preferred by many modern apps — reliable and open-source. |
| Redis | 6379 | In-memory data store for caching, queues, and session storage. |
| RabbitMQ | 5672 | Message broker for microservices communication. |
| Elasticsearch | 9200 | Used for log management, monitoring, and search functions. |
| Kubernetes API | 6443 | The command center of your k8s cluster. |
🚦 Quick Scenario: Why This Matters
Scenario:
Your CI/CD pipeline needs to SSH into a staging server after a successful build.
👉 SSH port 22 needs to be open on your security group/firewall.
Scenario:
You’re exposing a web service via Kubernetes Ingress.
👉 Ingress listens on ports 80 and 443. You better have HTTPS configured properly (hello, Let’s Encrypt)!
📌 Pro Tip: Use netstat / ss / nmap to Check Open Ports
sudo netstat -tulpn
sudo ss -tulpn
nmap -p 1-65535 <your-server-ip>
Me pretending to be a sysadmin while running nmap
🔍 Wrap Up
As a DevOps engineer, it’s not just about Dockerfiles and YAMLs. You should know how your services talk to each other, and that starts with protocols and ports.
Bookmark this, because your future self will thank you when production goes down at 3 AM.
Bonus: cheat sheet for port and protocols
Just google it.
See you on the other side of the network. 🤙🏻
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