What is CDN?
Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a highly distributed platform for servers. It helps minimize the delay in loading web content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user. This can help users all over the world watch the same high-quality content without reducing loading time.
The content origin server needs to respond to every end user’s requests if there’s no CDN. If the traffic peak is too high or the load persists, this will cause a large amount of traffic to flow to the origin and subsequent loads, thereby increasing the chance of originating failure.
By responding to the end user’s request instead of the original location, and being closer to the end-user physically and on the network, CDN can reduce the traffic burden on the content server and improve the Web experience, thereby benefiting content providers and their end-users.
How Does CDN work?
The content delivery network can provide more than half of the Internet traffic. The goal is to reduce latency by reducing the physical distance the request must travel (that is, the delay between submitting a web page request and fully loading the web page on the device). For example, if the request must traverse the Atlantic Ocean, American visitors who wish to view content from a UK server will experience poor loading times.
To avoid this problem to occur, Content Delivery Network generates multiple cached versions of the website content and store it in multiple geographic locations, that’s called “point of presence” (PoP). These PoPs will contain their own cache servers and will be responsible for delivering the content at the user’s location.
User agents are essentially devices running web browsers. They request content needed to render web pages, such as HTML, images, CSS, and JavaScript files. For most CDNs, each content request will cause the end-user to be mapped to the best placed CDN server, and the server will respond with a cached (pre-saved) version of the requested file. If it cannot find the file, it will look up the content on other servers on the CDN platform and send the response to the end-user. However, when the content is unavailable or out of date, the CDN will act as a request agent for the origin server and store the acquired content to serve future requests.
The type of content that Content Delivery Network can provide. In fact, it provides an incredible variety of content, including: 4K and HD quality video; and audio streaming; software downloads such as apps, games, and OS updates; data records that contain users’ personal information; and many more. So, the data that can be presented as a digital version, then it will be delivered through the CDN.
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