Content Delivery Network (CDN) is network of geographically distributed multiple data centers with aim to serve end-user with higher availability and performance. Contents are served to end-user user from the nearest available data center. Apart from this, CDNs also offloads the traffic served directly from the content provider’s origin infrastructure, thereby providing other secondary but important benefits.
Behind the scene, an XYZ website having millions potential user/customers, single web server can not handle all the traffic. So, XYZ sets up many servers that are geographically distributed and puts up a Reverse Proxy Server on the internet that will send users to the server closest to them when they try to visit XYZ.
Moreover, caching at Reverse Proxy minimizes the load on your origin server tremendously.
Examples:
- Apple Trailers uses Akamai
- Jquery.com hosts it’s javascript files using CloudFront CDN.
See also:
