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Content delivery network
A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and corresponding data centers. CDNs provide high availability and performance ("speed") through geographical distribution relative to end users, and arose in the late 1990s to alleviate the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as it was becoming a critical medium. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of Internet content, including text, graphics and scripts, downloadable objects (media files, software, and documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media services.
CDNs are a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their end users. In turn, a CDN pays Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers.
CDN is an umbrella term spanning different types of content delivery services: video streaming, software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, transparent caching, and services to measure CDN performance, load balancing, Multi CDN switching and analytics and cloud intelligence. CDN vendors may cross over into other industries like security, DDoS protection and web application firewalls (WAF), and WAN optimization.
Content delivery service providers include Akamai Technologies, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Qwilt (Cisco), Fastly, CDN77, BunnyCDN, EdgeNext, and Google Cloud CDN.
CDN nodes are usually deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple Internet backbones. Benefits include reducing bandwidth costs, improving page load times, and increasing the global availability of content. The number of nodes and servers making up a CDN varies, depending on the architecture, some reaching thousands of nodes with tens of thousands of servers on many remote points of presence (PoPs). Others build a global network and have a small number of geographical PoPs.
Requests for content are typically algorithmically directed to nodes that are optimal in some way. When optimizing for performance, locations that are best for serving content to the user may be chosen. This may be measured by choosing locations that are the fewest hops or the shortest time to the requesting client, or the highest server performance, to optimize delivery across local networks. When optimizing for cost, locations that are the least expensive may be chosen instead. In an optimal scenario, these two goals tend to align, as edge servers that are close to the end user at the edge of the network may have an advantage in performance and cost.
Most CDN providers will provide their services over a varying, defined, set of PoPs, depending on the coverage desired, such as United States, Asia-Pacific, International or Global, etc. These sets of PoPs can be called "edges", "edge nodes", "edge servers", or "edge networks" as they would be the closest edge of CDN assets to the end user.
CDN concepts:
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Content delivery network AI simulator
(@Content delivery network_simulator)
Content delivery network
A content delivery network (CDN) or content distribution network is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and corresponding data centers. CDNs provide high availability and performance ("speed") through geographical distribution relative to end users, and arose in the late 1990s to alleviate the performance bottlenecks of the Internet as it was becoming a critical medium. Since then, CDNs have grown to serve a large portion of Internet content, including text, graphics and scripts, downloadable objects (media files, software, and documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media services.
CDNs are a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their end users. In turn, a CDN pays Internet service providers (ISPs), carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers.
CDN is an umbrella term spanning different types of content delivery services: video streaming, software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, transparent caching, and services to measure CDN performance, load balancing, Multi CDN switching and analytics and cloud intelligence. CDN vendors may cross over into other industries like security, DDoS protection and web application firewalls (WAF), and WAN optimization.
Content delivery service providers include Akamai Technologies, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Qwilt (Cisco), Fastly, CDN77, BunnyCDN, EdgeNext, and Google Cloud CDN.
CDN nodes are usually deployed in multiple locations, often over multiple Internet backbones. Benefits include reducing bandwidth costs, improving page load times, and increasing the global availability of content. The number of nodes and servers making up a CDN varies, depending on the architecture, some reaching thousands of nodes with tens of thousands of servers on many remote points of presence (PoPs). Others build a global network and have a small number of geographical PoPs.
Requests for content are typically algorithmically directed to nodes that are optimal in some way. When optimizing for performance, locations that are best for serving content to the user may be chosen. This may be measured by choosing locations that are the fewest hops or the shortest time to the requesting client, or the highest server performance, to optimize delivery across local networks. When optimizing for cost, locations that are the least expensive may be chosen instead. In an optimal scenario, these two goals tend to align, as edge servers that are close to the end user at the edge of the network may have an advantage in performance and cost.
Most CDN providers will provide their services over a varying, defined, set of PoPs, depending on the coverage desired, such as United States, Asia-Pacific, International or Global, etc. These sets of PoPs can be called "edges", "edge nodes", "edge servers", or "edge networks" as they would be the closest edge of CDN assets to the end user.
CDN concepts: