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Content delivery network

A content delivery network or contentdistribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployedin multiple data centers. The goal of a CDN is to serve content to end-userswith high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large fraction of theInternet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts),downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications(e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, andsocial networks.

Content providers such as media companiesand e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to theiraudience of end-users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and networkoperators for hosting its servers in their data centers. Besides betterperformance and availability, CDNs also offload the traffic served directlyfrom the content provider’s origin infrastructure, resulting in possible costsavings for the content provider. In addition, CDNs provide the contentprovider a degree of protection from DoS attack by using their largedistributed server infrastructure to absorb the attack traffic.