What is a CDN

Content Delivery Network is a distributed group of servers placed in different places on in different countries which are working together to deliver the content of a webpage which you type in your browser.


A CDN is responsible to fast delivery of assets which are necessary for loading of a webpage like: HTML pages, JAVASCRIPT files, CSS, Images and Videos.

When your typing amazon.com the content which you see in your browser are not directly fetched directly from Seattle, Washington, United State but it's fetched from nearest edge servers or locations.

as shown in bellow picture that there are servers of Amazon in many countries and continents so that whenever a client from that country wants to open amazon website, the request should not go directly to the main server because it will take time instead it will be fetched from nearest amazon server.

What are the advantages of using CDN?

The companies or websites which are dealing with lot's of load and visitors must use CDN because the moderns internet users are very impatient that only 2 seconds of delay will retire them before purchasing your great products and that 2 seconds will effect you  4.3% of loss per visitor.  I uncovered a secret yeah thank me later :D

so here are few benefits of using CDN:

1. Decrease in server load
your website contents are spread in several CDN servers that's why all the requests won't be knocking the door of single/main server waiting to open the door whereas the poor server is crying in a corner and be like: No baby i can't handle all these bloody requests at once😭.

2. No DDOS attackCloud solutions are designed to stop an attack before it ever reaches your data center. A CDN will take on the traffic and keep your website up and running. This means you need not be concerned about DDoS attacks impacting your data center, keeping your business' website safe and sound.

3. Segmenting your visitors will become easy
CDN is able to deliver different content to different users depending on the kind of device requesting the content and are capable of detecting mobile or computer devices to deliver device-specific version of that content.

4. Lower network latency 
A website using CDN will not have jitter clients or visitors since it delivers them high quality content with lower delay in delivering the content.

5. High Availability and better usage Analytics
CDNs dynamically distribute assets to the strategically placed core, fallback, and edge servers. CDNs can give more control of asset delivery and network load. They can optimize capacity per customer, provide views of real-time load and statistics, reveal which assets are popular, show active regions and report exact viewing details to customers. CDNs can thus offer 100% availability, even with large power, network or hardware outages. 

6. Security data storage

CDN offers secure data storage to enterprises that needs it for their content such as videos as well as enhanced data backup .

What is Edge Computing?

Edge computing is a network strategy that brings the computing as close the  source of data as possible. 

an example of edge computing can also be: when you open a website for the first time it will take some time to load but when you again visit that website it will open faster because most of its content are cached in your local computer C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Box\Box\cache.

Bringing computing to the network edge reduces the amount of long-distance communication and latency between server and client.

What is the network edge?

For internet devices, the network edge is where the device, or the local network containing the device, communicates with the Internet.  For example a user’s computer or the processor inside of an IoT camera can be considered the network edge, but the user’s router, ISP, or local edge server are also considered the edge. The important takeaway is that the edge of the network is geographically close to the device, unlike origin servers and cloud servers, which can be very far from the devices they communicate with.

What’s an example of edge computing?

Consider a building secured with dozens of high-definition IoT video cameras. These are ‘dumb’ cameras that simply output a raw video signal and continuously stream that signal to a cloud server. On the cloud server, the video output from all the cameras is put through a motion-detection application to ensure that only clips featuring activity are saved to the server’s database. This means there is a constant and significant strain on the building’s Internet infrastructure, as significant bandwidth gets consumed by the high volume of video footage being transferred. Additionally, there is very heavy load on the cloud server that has to process the video footage from all the cameras simultaneously.

Now imagine that the motion sensor computation is moved to the network edge. What if each camera used its own internal computer to run the motion-detecting application and then sent footage to the cloud server as needed? This would result in a significant reduction in bandwidth use, because much of the camera footage will never have to travel to the cloud server. Additionally, the cloud server would now only be responsible for storing the important footage, meaning that the server could communicate with a higher number of cameras without getting overloaded. This is what edge computing looks like.