What is a CDN?

A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, delivers content to a website visitor from a physical location as close as possible to that visitor.

Why should I care?

The longer it takes to load a page, the more likely a user will switch to a different product.

Your website might seem responsive and quick to load because the developer has decided to host it in a region close to your location. What about customers on the other side of the world? You typically find latency issues when you travel to another continent and proudly attempt to show your application to someone there.

How does it work?

CDN providers maintain data centers around the world. They use complex machinery to cache and serve content to a user as fast as possible. From an application developer perspective though, they are amazingly user-friendly. It requires just a one-time setup for DNS records and forwarding rules.

Because a CDN functions at the network edge, CDNs usually include RBAC features.