Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of [[Server|servers]] that caches content close to end users. A CDN allows for the quick transfer of assets needed for loading Internet content, including [[HTML]] pages, [[JavaScript]] files, [[CSS|stylesheets]], images, and videos.

The popularity of CDN services continues to grow, and today the majority of web traffic is served through CDNs, including traffic from major sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of interconnected servers that speeds up webpage loading for data-heavy applications.

When a user visits a website, data from that website's server has to travel across the internet to reach the user's computer. If the user is located far from that server, it will take a long time to load a large file, such as a video or website image. Instead, the website content is stored on CDN servers geographically closer to the users and reaches their computers much faster.

The primary purpose of a content delivery network (CDN) is to reduce latency, or reduce the delay in communication created by a network's design. Because of the global and complex nature of the internet, communication traffic between websites (servers) and their users (clients) has to move over large physical distances. The communication is also two-way, with requests going from the client to the server and responses coming back.

A CDN improves efficiency by introducing intermediary servers between the client and the website server. These CDN servers manage some of the client-server communications. They decrease web traffic to the web server, reduce bandwidth consumption, and improve the user experience of your applications.