What is a CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of geographically distributed servers that work together to deliver web content quickly to users based on their location. CDNs improve page load times, reduce latency, and decrease the load on origin servers.
CDNs also provide additional security benefits:
- Act as a reverse proxy to protect the origin server.
- Mitigate DDoS attacks by absorbing malicious traffic.
- Enable HTTPS with SSL/TLS to encrypt content in transit.
Examples of CDN usage include:
- Streaming video or audio to a global audience.
- Serving images, CSS, and JavaScript files for websites.
- Accelerating API responses in distributed applications.
By caching content closer to users, CDNs optimize performance, reduce server costs, and improve website reliability under heavy traffic.