Content Delivery Network - What is it and its importance for a scalable web system.
Debashis Debnath
SDE2 @ Amex || Software Artist ???? ?? || Frontend || React.js || Web & Internet || JavaScript & TypeScript || Opinions are my own and doesn’t represent my employer!
What's a CDN?
A CDN, or a content delivery network, helps you store & cache the important resources for your website, like css files, js files, images etc.
In simple terms, CDNs are collection of servers that host your resources. There are two kinds of servers involved in CDNs - 1. Origin server, 2. Edge servers. Origin is the centralised server & edge servers are the servers that hosts the copies of resources and are strategically located so that a particular client can have access to its geographically close edge servers.
Whenever a client requests for a resource for the first time, it knocks the origin server which sends the resource as well as a copy of the resource to the edge server.
So next time whenever the client requests for the same resource, Edge server sends it the cached copy of the resource, that's how the response is retrieved faster!
The routing to the edge server based on the location is done by DNS routing.
So CDN can be used by linking to third party cdn services like jsdelivr or cloudflare, or you can build your own local cdn using your servers.
Advantages:
Few benefits of using cdns are: faster load time, improved seo, user retention, back up & failover mechanism etc.
Media Innovator | Driving Digital Transformation for Global Leaders in OTT, Content Solutions, and Workflows
1 个月Hi Debashis Debnath, What do you think about predictive AI when connected to a CDN? I'm writing an article based on a real case I experienced, and it's incredible how much cost reduction can be achieved.