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Content Delivery Network (CDN): Explained in simple words
Introduction
Few years back, I came across a new e-commerce website while browsing the internet. I noticed that the images on the website didn’t load quickly. I refreshed the page and retried a couple of times. Finally, after ten seconds, I was able to see the rendered webpage with images.
Initially, I thought my internet connection was poor but the internet download speed was good enough. I was able to view Youtube videos in HD as well. This sparked my curiosity to know why the e-commerce website wasn’t able to load images quickly.
The curious engineer inside me decided to research the reason for the website’s slow performance. I quickly opened google’s developer tools and navigated to the Networking tab for analysis. After going through a couple of Stack Overflow posts, the conclusion was that the site didn’t use Content Delivery Network (CDN).
In this article, we will understand what a CDN is, why it is needed and it’s working. Also, we will see how websites can accelerate their content delivery by harnessing a CDN.
Background
The poor performance of the website didn’t create a good first impression on me. And due to it’s slow performance, I decided that I won’t shop on the website again.
