Working with CDN – Part 1

What is CDN?

CDN is a Content Delivery Network. Just kidding…
Jokes apart, Content Delivery Network is a platform/ group of distributed servers or network that provides cached web content from a network/ server location closest to a user. It is a mediator between the origin server and user that delivers content faster as per the request to the server. Complicated??? We will look into details…

How CDN Works?

• The main concept of CDN is to improve the delivery time of web content from the origin server to the user. It stores static content like HTML images, CSS and javascript from the server and delivers them to the user.
• A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a platform of geographically distributed servers/ networks which quickly delivers web pages and other web contents to user on the basis of the geographic location of the user.
• When a user searches for your website, they are redirected to the web host’s server of their geographic location. So every user of your website is accessing this one server of the particular location. Now if your website contains heavy traffic then it reduces the efficiency of your server and takes more time to load and reduces the speed of content delivery.
• This is where CDN will work. CDN caches your static content from the origin server and quickly delivers the content. It copies the content of the website to distributed servers of geographical location and caches the pages. When user requests for the page that is part of the CDN server, CDN will redirect it from originating server to distributed servers in geographical location.

For ex.,

• You have a shoe factory and it is on a big scale of selling shoes. You need to sell your products all over the world. Customers from all over the world are not able to come to your factory and buy shoes. of course, it’s not feasible for all to travel far and buy products or it’s not feasible for you to deliver the product so far. So now you have to distribute your products on a small scale in different countries i.e. there are different shops in different cities for your product. Now the shops of that geographical location will deliver the product to particular locations and delivery will be fast as compared to the delivery from direct factory. So there’s no difficulty for you and your customer for product delivery.
• The same thing happens with CDN servers. For here, shop in different countries is the CDN servers in geographical locations and the shoe factory is the origin server. Users which here are the customers will request the data that is the product, CDN servers of that location which are shops here will deliver the content which is stored in the cache (products stored in the shops) as fast as compared to the delivery direct from the origin server (shop factory). This will decrease the load in the origin server(shop factory) and increase the usability of your store. CDN server takes less redirection time and delivers fast content.