Content delivery network

A CDN caches static content in hundreds of locations near users. It cuts latency from hundreds of milliseconds to a few dozen, absorbs traffic spikes and is often cheaper per gigabyte than serving from your own servers.

Where it shows up in real systems

  • CDN

    Images, scripts, styles and videos are cached at the edge, so most requests never reach your servers. Longer TTLs raise the hit ratio but make content updates slower to appear; an origin shield collapses cache misses from all edges into one.

    In production: Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly, Azure Front Door

See it break, then fix it

Build an architecture, send it a day of traffic and outages, and learn why it holds or fails. Free to start.