Updated April 4, 2023
Definition of CDN Benefits
CDN benefits is defined as a subtopic under the purview of Content Delivery Network to understand the advantages of the CDN methodology in the task of delivering faster delivery of the content on Internet. Content Delivery Network acronym’d as CDN signifies a distribution of group of servers within the geographical boundary to enable fast delivery of content over internet. Content Delivery Network enables quicker transfer of assets which are needed for loading of the Internet content.
These assets include HTML pages, files like JavaScript, images and videos along with many other elements which the particular website would require for smooth functioning. In today’s world, digital platforms are being served by the competence CDN brings in for the faster delivery of the content. Websites like Facebook, Netflix, Amazon harness the power of CDN for providing better experience to users.
Various Benefits of CDN
From the introduction, simplistically we will assume CDN as group of servers that are connected so that the contents which gets delivered are faster, cheaper, reliable, and secured. These servers in CDN are placed at points of exchange of different network that needs to be connected.
This physical location where the internet service providers (ISP) connect with CSN is known as Internet exchange point (IXP) and are the primary location of any content getting generated. Now the CDNs are connected to the origin server through a high speed and a highly interconnected web, can provide delightful experience with reduction in the transit times and on top of that, at reduced costs. These CDN servers are placed at very strategic locations throughout the globe not only to provide the seamless experience but also providing shield to various failure mode that might occur in the network and pave through the network congestion effectively. Not only the placements, the CDNs itself makes a lot of optimizations with respect to the data transfer at the client or server side. The working of CDNs are more complex.
Given below are the benefits of CDNs in detail:
1. Improving the load time of website (Latency)
In our earlier paragraph on understanding the working we saw that the servers are geographically located at strategic positions. This enables the distance between the users and the website resources to be reduced by great extent. It means that the user connects to a data center that is geographically closer to the point where user launches the website it connects to the closer one rather than the original server (which might be miles away from the user launch location). With the reduction in the travel time, the service available to the users is faster.
We also saw about the optimizations that takes place as a work item of CDNs. Instead of going into the depth of optimization we should be aware that these optimizations enable an efficient load balancing on the server along with using solid state hard drives which allows content to have lesser latency. In the process of optimization, the way the packets are transferred, for example using the process of minification and file compression smaller files are sent, and that leads to quicker load times. Websites that use TLS/SSL certificates are also optimized to speed up by looking at reusing the connection and enable the TLS false alert method.
2. Making the website always available online
One of the critical KPI for any website working is the uptime to understand the health of the website. Some of the common causes of interrupted uptime can be mapped to failures in the hardware, spikes in network traffic, cyber-attack, or even as small as increase in the popularity of the website.
Using CDN one can easily balance the load so that the network traffic is distributed across the several servers available making it easier to handle millions of concurrent requests. In case of failure, there is a convenient failover which will re-allocate the traffic of the failed server to other servers, so that one server doesn’t get all the load. In major failure like entire data center having technical issues, routing mechanism to transfer the traffic completely to other data center can be also used.
3. Protection of data (Data Security)
With the advent of newer security technologies, CDN can provide a site secured through providing fresh certificates for TLS/SSL. The certificate ensure high standard of authentication by enabling better encryption and integrity.
4. Reduction of bandwidth costs
With the advent of newer technologies, when a CDN resides in between the user and the hosting server the traffic between the host server and the rest of the internet is isolated thus leading to reduced latency. With cached content, the origin server wouldn’t have to deliver the same content again and again.
5. Enabling a global reach
With CDN servers being set up in every strategic locations, far away from the origin server along with optimizations, makes the world a smaller place and hence enabling a global reach which is quite evident from the exponential increase in the global use of CDN in the last few years.
6. Analytics
With the boom of using Analytics, CDN can be benefitted by analyzing trends, that can be used as troubleshooting or marketing material for the organization that enables CDN.
Conclusion
We, with this article got a glimpse the working of CDN and while understanding the benefits of CDN, we can easily tie it back to the working so that we related of why we say that the benefit is actually a benefit.
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