What Is Content Delivery Network?

You may have wondered, occasionally at least, about the origin of the huge amounts of data that you consume on a daily basis. Only a little knowledgeable thinking will suggest that from videos on Youtube to GIFs on imgur (pronounced imager, for the uninitiated) to presentations on Slideshare, all this content must be coming from places that are geographically rooted at certain places. This provision of data of various types from servers all over the world is what forms the overall content delivery network (CDN).

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) could be a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their information centers. The goal is to distribute data provision services to spatially relatively far apart end-users to result in high accessibility and high performance. CDNs serve an oversized portion of the web content these days, together with net objects (text, graphics, and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.

CDNs are a layer within the holistic net system. Content users and consumers love media firms’ offerings of TV shows, movies, and live content, and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their last mile users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their information centers.

CDN is an umbrella term spanning differing kinds of content delivery services: video streaming, movie, music and game downloads, net and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, clear caching, and services that act as indices for CDN performance, server load reconciliation, multi-CDN usage and analytics and cloud intelligence. CDN vendors can also cross over into alternative industries like security, with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection and net application firewalls (WAF), and WAN optimization.

Content Delivery Networks are very important for catering to the almost infinitely various demands of content consumers especially these days when the teens population has grown up with video streaming and nonstop social media surfing.