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  • Content Delivery Network - Transcript

  • Hi, I'm Ryan Sumner I am a Chief Delivery Network Architect with IBM Cloud and today

  • I'm going help you answer what is a Content Delivery Network.

  • So, in short, a Content Delivery Network, or CDN, is a service that accelerates internet

  • content delivery.

  • So, in other words the main benefit of a CDN is that it makes your website faster.

  • So, before I get into describing to you how it accomplishes that and some of the other

  • benefits.

  • First, I want to talk to you about some of the challenges that we have where we have

  • users all around the world, but we don't have servers all around the world and the experience

  • that those users have due to that dynamic.

  • So, I got a simple diagram here showing a server hosted down in Dallas, this is my website,

  • and I have users all around the world.

  • So, in Sydney I might have five, in London I've got five, New York I might have ten,

  • and LA I might have ten.

  • I've thirty users around the world they're accessing my server and my website down in

  • Dallas.

  • So, lets you can follow a set of these users in their journey and let's look at their users

  • down in Sydney.

  • They make a request to the website they got an eighty six hundred mile hike to Dallas

  • and then in eighty-six hundred mile hike back.

  • The amount of time that that takes is usually measured in milliseconds and just that round

  • trip might be about a hundred and seventy milliseconds.

  • For our users up in London that might be about a hundred milliseconds.

  • Our users in New York City can probably experience about a forty milliseconds round-trip time.

  • And over in LA about thirty.

  • So, as you can see, the further you're away, the longer it takes and ultimately the slower

  • the website will be for you.

  • So, this is where the CDN comes into play and this is how it actually accomplishes the

  • increase in speed which is by reducing the amount of distance between the user and the

  • content, or the server providing the content.

  • So, what it does by doing that it places these Content Delivery Network end points in as

  • many locations around the world as possible.

  • And in our case, we're going to assume we've got one in just about every location where

  • users exist.

  • So, now when the user in Sydney, or London, or New York City, or LA tries to access some

  • content its first retrieved by the Content Delivery Network service and then distributed

  • around the world.

  • So, we have a single request down to the Dallas server.

  • It's now the distributed all around the world.

  • And our users in London now instead of going all the way to Dallas they're able to retrieve

  • that content directly from their closest geographical location, drastically reducing the amount

  • of time that it takes to retrieve that content.

  • So, as you can see here it's a very basic how a CDN is able to provide the benefits

  • of to the end user by reducing the amount of time that it takes to deliver the service,

  • but what you're not seen here is an indirect benefit is the reduction in the amount of

  • traffic that actually hits the Dallas server.

  • So, the indirect benefit is that you actually see a reduction in the load, or the reduction

  • in the amount of capacity that you need in Dallas to serve all these users.

  • So, another indirect benefit because there is much less validity and so much less stuff

  • happening in Dallas, because all these users are not having to make these trips, and I'm

  • also not having to communicate with users so far away.

  • The Dallas environment may also see an increase in up time.

  • And then lastly because the users are not really directly communicating with the server

  • down in Dallas you have the indirect benefit of an increase in security through obscurity.

  • So, it's pretty basic to understand how a CDN works, in the end it provide a better

  • benefit to the end user.

  • Thanks for watching this overview of Content Delivery Network.

  • If you liked it, or have any questions please comment below.

  • Stay tuned for additional videos in the future and please don't forget to like and subscribe.

Content Delivery Network - Transcript

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