When was the last time you tried accessing a webpage only to sit there waiting and waiting for it load? To be fair, often this is due to network performance at that particular moment.
But what if there was a way to physically place your organization’s data closer to the requestor? Would that help in reducing latency?
Absolutely.
Content delivery networks were created to help alleviate network congestion. Getting content from centrally located servers to individual users took too long, creating network traffic jams.
One reason enterprises use content delivery networks is for this purpose. Content is physically located on servers that are geographically closer to the requestor. This reduces latency as the content or data does not have to travel as far. When data does not have to travel as far, performance is improved.
If an enterprise has a large amount of users accessing their website or services from a geographically dispersed area, this is where a content delivery network would be a great idea. Conversely, a local school or business may not need to have distant users access their data, therefore a content delivery network would not be needed or impactful.
Another reason enterprises use content delivery networks is due to an added layer of security that it can provide.
Remember if data in a content delivery network is closer to the requestor, then the request is not actually getting to the originating server. It is being retrieved from the cache as to prevent the request from needing to access the originating server.
So by routing requests to the content delivery network a malicious attempt such as a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack can be mitigated, and even eliminated.
Distributed denial of service attacks attempt to flood your servers with requests, overloading and preventing your organization from hosting its services. Therefore, using a content delivery network can eliminate the threat by eliminating the opportunity to even reach the server.
I drafted an example of what this would look like to help gain a better understanding visually. Check it out below.
In summary, content delivery networks improve the availability, reliability and performance of data and IT systems and are a critical component of enterprise architecture.
Thanks for reading!
Resources:
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/what-is-a-cdn/
https://www.ibm.com/topics/content-delivery-networks
https://www.akamai.com/our-thinking/cdn/what-is-a-cdn