How Content Delivery Networks Work

Introduction - Content Delivery Network CDNs are important because they improve performance, scalability, availability, and reliability of services. Understanding what they are can help you not only work with them but also apply their ideas to solve similar problems in your own reverse proxies or infrastructure. Short history: Before CDNs, websites depended on single origin servers, causing high latency and outages under traffic spikes. In the late 1990s, Akamai introduced distributed caching and routing users to nearby servers, selling it as a premium acceleration service for large enterprises. With the rise of video platforms like Youtube and Netflix, CDNs became essential to handle massive global traffic and streaming. Over time, pricing dropped and delivery became commoditized, so today CDNs compete mainly through services on top, such as WAF, DDoS protection, TLS termination, bot management, API protection, analytics, and edge compute, not just content delivery. Forward and Revers