What is Content Delivery Network (CDN)

One second ago, I thought CDN meant CloudFlare DNS or something like that, but now after discovering the truth, I'm here to share what I've learned:

What is a CDN?

A CDN is an acronym for Content Delivery Network. It is a network of servers distributed across the globe to make content (such as images, videos, JavaScript, CSS files, and other resources) load faster. The main goal of a CDN is to improve the loading speeds and reliability of the network and make users happy.

How do CDNs work

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of geographically distributed servers called edge servers, each with a copy or cache of data on the original server. These servers work together to deliver content (such as images, videos, JavaScript, CSS files, and other resources) to users based on their geographic location. CDN improves internet speed and reliability and makes users satisfied.

Exhibition of origin and edge server
source: https://www.cloudns.net/blog/cdn-content-delivery-network/

Guess what, you just used a CDN, entered this page, and loaded the Fonts and other assets that are needed for this page to load, the Content Delivery Network found your local edge server and requested data from there since the world is connected with huge submarine Fiber optic cables. If the server is in Antarctica for example then all of us will wait a trivial 160ms (The time it takes for light to reach the server)  approximately for the data REQUEST to arrive and then the time needed by the server to find your data and THEN send it back within another 160ms, which is absurd.

Moreover, a CDN has many benefits. In addition to making content load faster, they also make the website safer by providing (Distributed Denial of Service) protection, SSL/TLS encryption, and Web Application Firewalls (WAF). There are multiple CDNs around the world, and each of them has its own network of servers across the world, I believe the reason I thought it had something to do with Cloudflare is that I was right. Cloudflare is a CDN. Funny, right?

Here is a list of some common CDNs:

• Cloudflare
• Akamai
• jsDelivr
• Google Cloud CDN
• Amazon CloudFront

You're not responsible for choosing your own CDN, but the web developers are, they choose what service to use for their Domain, for example, use Blogger, so the CDN for me is Google and I can't change it until I get a Domaint that I can play around with.

Conclusion

And that's all it, in a nutshell, imagine a CDN as the middleman between you and the original server, each edge server is a middleman that is the nearest to you, namely you can even check all Cloudflare servers near you.

Thank you for reading