Content Delivery Network (CDN)

What Is CDN?

When you visit a website you are being loaded content from that server, if you are not using a CDN you are putting little stress on the server to render the pages and serve you the content. Now, if you have many visitors this can really slow down your server and can lead to an unresponsive webpage. If you have a very major website and people are finding your website loading slow it’s probably going to lose some visitors.

So, how do we handle that? By using CDN. CDN distribute the static content of your websites like pictures and videos and puts them to the location closer to the people you are serving the content, and that varies by what Content Delivery Network you are using.

Content Delivery Network Architecture

There are multiple Content Delivery Networks available out  there including

• Amazon’s AWS
• Akamai
• MaxCDN
• Rackspace

These services have servers all over the world. And what it does? It cashes the content to those servers and then the person visits your site it load those images from those node servers instead of your personal server. Thus taking the load off of your server and distributing it out across that network.

How Content Delivery Network helps your business?

Let’s think it like a tree up of the very top you have your application server. This is the root source of everything and anything that is there in your website picture, videos, images content all of that is right here. And let's think that we want to implement a Content Delivery Network.

How is this happen well its usually by DNS change. You usually get a DNS record for your Content Delivery Network and they usually get that for you. You place Images, Pictures, Videos, links that happen to have within your website.

Most likely you are using some sort of website that has automation so that will happen using that way. Now, there are two types of content delivery network

• Push &
• Pull

When you Push the server that means you are actually pushing all of that static content on to the content networks servers. For ex: if I have to upload an image, what will happen to the server is it will take that image and Push it off to the Content Delivery Network. That content delivery network will then takes that image and cash it out across its network.

A Pull server works a little bit differently, somebody actually has to request to the link to what you are looking for. For ex: An image when the very first person goes to that image the CDN is going to go to your root server pull that image out, downloaded to its server and then distributed across the network to be served. So, when you first implement a Pull server CDN, you are going have a little bit slow loading. Because it starting to cash all of the content.

Now, which one good and which one is worse for your business? It really depends on the situation.

Now, that we have all of these content served across the network how does it work?Pretty simple, these content delivery networks have things called nodes. These nodes and servers are all around the world. They get the servers as many places as possible to serve the content locally and then when the user may be from the foreign country or maybe across the street whatever its going to look up it goes to get the images.

Content Delivery Network recognizes the DNA from any location and find the closest node to the location and load the image, videos, content from there. Thus in turn allowing your users to get faster on the load on your server.  This will cost you some money per gigabyte. So not very bad when you have a high traffic website.  Websites like Youtube implement something like this. It is very helpful for people who might have slow websites or web servers that earn the very fastest service that’s out there. It allows you t basically reach more people in a shorter amount of time.

Benefits of using CDN

There are four key benefits of having CDN

• Performance: it is a big word including a lot of things. The first one is moving content faster. It could be because using cash in half away from the end user. It can also mean reducing the size of the content by minimizing images, compressing content all of that in the Cloud of the CDN. So, that user gets the benefits of more of us full free. It can also mean to render the page faster. So that’s when you get all the way to the clime label and the CDN can optimize the content to the better browser. It can also reduce the amount of content of byte that you are delivering. For ex: you can reduce the size of the image all on the fly addition and deliver to the client an optimal version.
• Availability: When you are talking about availability, you are basically talking how much time you are aligned and how much time you are down. It means that most of your business will be down. When you are using CDN that can help you either because of its cash or because of a feature to serve content even when you are not available. It helps you scale and that’s very important.
• Security: This is the core competency for your CDN. CDN is somewhere between the client and the attackers and you need a strategically great possession to defend you. So it can offer functionalities of firewalls to protect about a cross-side network coming from different locations. It can protect you against malicious tags and also with both management to handle your genuine customers better.
• Intelligence: This one is the fourth and the best key benefit of CDN. If you look into a large amount of data from different user locations, different network additions, different kios, different everything that can gather data not just to add and deliver faster the content on any time anywhere but also they can expose part of that information for you. So, you make intelligent business decisions targeting your audience based on information availability.