Content Delivery Network

September 15, 2025

What is CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of servers designed to deliver web content and digital assets (like images, videos, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files) quickly and reliably to users.

Core Idea

Instead of all users requesting content from a single origin server (which may be far away or overloaded), a CDN caches copies of content on edge servers located in data centers around the world.
When a user requests a webpage or media file, the CDN directs them to the nearest server (geographically or in terms of network latency).
This reduces latency, improves load times, and helps handle high traffic efficiently.

Examples

Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, Google Cloud CDN are popular CDN providers.
Video platforms like Netflix and YouTube rely heavily on CDNs to stream content smoothly worldwide.
E-commerce and news sites use CDNs to ensure pages load fast for customers everywhere.