#53: CDN: Content Delivery Network: global scale caching

Around IT in 256 seconds

CDN is a set of geographically distributed servers for fast content delivery. Without CDN all requests are routed to your own server, located somewhere in the world. For example, in San Francisco. If your visitor lives in Australia, the experience is rather poor. But now imagine the traffic to your website is proxied through a global caching layer. Your visitor in Australia downloads data from an edge server nearby. A different visitor in Cape Town, Africa, will be routed to a completely different CDN server. The routing is done by the CDN itself, typically via DNS. It’s transparent to your visitors. Of course, all CDN servers contain the same data. Moreover, pretty much no-one contacts your own server in San Francisco. Only the CDN network itself. Technically, visitors don’t even know the address of your origin server! They use domain name like example.com and DNS routes to appropriate cache server.

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