Content delivery network
A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers.
Description
The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-users with high availability and high performance.
CDNs serve a large fraction of the Internet content today, including:
- Web objects (text, style sheets, graphics and scripts)
- Downloadable objects (media files, software, documents)
- Applications (e-commerce, portals)
- Live streaming media
- On-demand streaming media
- Social networks
CDNs for web designers
CDNs are commonly used in web design for libraries and frameworks, including:
Economics
Content providers such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their audience of end-users.
In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers.
Besides better performance and availability, CDNs also offload the traffic served directly from the content provider's origin infrastructure, resulting in possible cost savings for the content provider.
In addition, CDNs provide the content provider a degree of protection from DoS attacks by using their large distributed server infrastructure to absorb the attack traffic.
See also
External links
- Content delivery network @ Wikipedia
