Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers, which render media content like images, videos, downloadable files like javascript files, static html files etc.

CDNs provide high performance and high availability. A lot of companies provide CDN as a service offering, where different clients can host their content and the client companies pay for utilizing these CDN services.

CDNs also implement load balancing, caching and compression of media files to achieve high performance.

Importance of CDN in Architecture and Cloud:

In any application, one of the factors which will affect the performance of the User Interface layer is the speed at which the content is delivered to the client. If the static content like javascript files, images, videos etc., is served up from the application server, then it would burden the load on the application server and will cause performance issues. So it is a good practice to use a CDN and serve up media content from CDNs, as CDNs will guarantee high performance.

Reference Implementations:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides a CDN ‘Amazon CloudFront’. Similarly, Google provides a CDN for serving Angular JS files.