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I spent the last couple of months writing code in Rust. It was probably my third or fourth attempt to write something substantial in this language. And every time my level of understanding of things deepened. I'm by no means a Rust expert so probably I'll be extremely inaccurate in the terminology here. And likely I'll get lots of technical details wrong too. But I had this epiphany moment of how the visibility and privacy model works in Rust so I can't help but think of sharing it with someone else.

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The difference between these two networking devices has been an unsolvable mystery to me for quite some time. For a while, I used to use the words "bridge" and "switch" interchangeably. But after getting more into networking, I started noticing that some people tend to see them as rather different devices... So, maybe I've been totally wrong? Maybe saying "bridge aka switch" is way too inaccurate?

Let's try to figure it out!

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As a software engineer, I need to deal with networking every now and then - be it configuring a SOHO network, setting up container networking, or troubleshooting connectivity between servers in a data center. The domain is pretty broad, and the terminology can get quite confusing quickly. This article is my layman's attempt to sort the basic things out with the minimum words and maximum drawings. The primary focus will be on the Data link layer (OSI L2) of wired networks where the Ethernet is the king nowadays. But I'll slightly touch upon its neighboring layers too.

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In Ethernet Lab - Broadcast domain we learned how to use switches (bridges) to merge multiple L2 segments into a single broadcast domain. In this lab, we'll see how to use the VLAN capabilities of a switch to split a single broadcast domain into multiple smaller domains.

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In Ethernet, all the nodes forming one L2 segment constitute a broadcast domain. Such nodes should be able to communicate using their L2 addresses (MAC) or by broadcasting frames. A broadcast domain is a logical division of a computer network. Multiple physical (L1) segments can be bridged to form a single broadcast domain. Multiple L2 segments can also be bridged to create a bigger broadcast domain.

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