Cloud & DevOps
A CDN is a globally distributed network of servers that caches and delivers web content — images, CSS, JavaScript, and HTML — from locations geographically close to each user, reducing latency and improving load times.
Without a CDN, every user worldwide fetches assets from a single origin server, which introduces latency proportional to physical distance — a user in Mumbai accessing a server in New York experiences hundreds of milliseconds of network delay per asset. A CDN replicates content across dozens or hundreds of edge nodes globally (Points of Presence), so each user fetches assets from a nearby node, typically cutting latency to single-digit milliseconds. CDNs also protect origin servers by absorbing traffic at the edge, providing DDoS mitigation by distributing attack traffic across the network before it reaches the application. Beyond static assets, modern CDNs like Cloudflare and Fastly support edge computing — running JavaScript or WebAssembly at the edge node — enabling dynamic personalisation with static-file performance.
Example
A video streaming platform stores its video files on Amazon S3 and serves them through CloudFront CDN, reducing buffering for users in Southeast Asia by routing their requests to an edge node in Singapore rather than the US-east origin.
Related terms
SSG (Static Site Generation)
SSG is a web rendering technique in which HTML pages are pre-generated at build time rather than on each request, resulting in static files that are served from a CDN for maximum performance and minimal server infrastructure.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is the process of distributing incoming network traffic across multiple servers or instances to prevent any single server from becoming a bottleneck, improving application availability, throughput, and fault tolerance.
Serverless
Serverless is a cloud execution model in which developers deploy individual functions or applications without provisioning or managing servers — the cloud provider automatically allocates compute resources on demand and charges only for actual execution time.
Scalability
Scalability is the ability of a software system to handle increasing workloads — more users, data, transactions, or requests — by adding resources without requiring fundamental redesign of the architecture.
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