Introduction
Being an internet user, you must get frustrated by the slow speed you get sometimes. Whether you’re using it for work, study or entertainment purposes, slow-speed internet kills the charm and leaves you fuming. To tackle that issue or at least make it better, concerned authorities have come up with CDN which stands for Content Delivery Network.
If you are someone who has heard of the term before but doesn’t have a clear idea of what it is you are in the right place. To have an extensive understanding of the topic you could always touch up sites like https://www.akamai.com/our-thinking/cdn/what-is-a-cdn. However, in this article, we’ll have an overview of CDN and let you know what it is and how it works.
Before that, let’s quickly put light on a subject that is ignored often and that is network security. In this time of the internet, major networks are being hacked and important data is being jeopardized. A few companies are starting to take actions against it and have started to provide services to make networks more secure. Zero trust is one of those network security models that you must get in touch with to get secured. Now, let’s learn a little detail about CDN.
What is CDN?
By delivering web material closer to users, a content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of geographically dispersed servers that speeds up the transmission of web content. Caching, a technique that temporarily saves copies of files is used by data centres all over the world so that you can access internet material through a web-enabled device or browser more rapidly through a server close to you.
Web pages, pictures, and videos are cached by CDNs on proxy servers close to your actual location. This eliminates the need to wait when performing tasks like watching a movie, downloading software, checking your bank account, posting on social media, or making transactions.
To make you understand better, you can think of CDN like fuel pumps. You can find fuel pumps in every corner of your area or city. This makes it convenient for you to fill up your gas tanks whenever you need to, even in emergency cases.
How Does CDN work?
A CDN’s main goal is to minimise latency. The irritating lag you encounter while trying to access a website or video stream before it has finished loading on your device is known as latency. Although it is just measured in milliseconds, it might seem like an eternity and potentially cause a time-out or load fault. The physical distance that the content must travel to reach you can be minimised by several content delivery networks to reduce latency. By placing the material as close to the end user as possible, larger, more widely dispersed CDNs are able to serve online content more rapidly and consistently.
Let’s say it’s a holiday and you want to take your me time and stream the latest most talked about English TV series release— the CDN will locate the best server in its network to deliver that video. Typically, that means the server that is nearest to where you are physically. The media files are cached and kept on that content delivery network server in case more users in the same region make requests for them. The CDN service will retain the recently obtained content to meet any upcoming requests if the content you requested is unavailable or out-of-date.
