I've written about servers, load balancing, and cloud computing, however, I've not written about how it comes together in reality. As we all know, where there are challenges, there are business opportunities, and some organizations have taken advantage of this opportunity.
You typically find that images, videos and other media content are the hardest to load and it's not always because of your internet connection, depending on how far away the server you're accessing is, you can access multimedia content very quickly or very slowly. While I have written about cloud computing's ability to scale an organization's reach across the internet, it's not to be mistaken as the "be all, end all" solution. Enough dilly-dallying 😅, I want to introduce you all to CDNs today.
CDNs EXPLAINED
CDN stands for "Content Delivery Network" and to explain what it does, I'll start with one fun fact for the day, it is recorded that Netflix users spent a combined 164 million hours PER DAY watching Netflix in 2019 😲. Having serve video content to millions of people every second is no small feat and this is where CDNs come in. CDNs are used to deliver content through multiple servers situated around the world in order to ensure everyone has a seamless experience.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
Social media platforms and streaming services rely heavily on CDNs to ensure that netizens don't experience lag on their platforms. CDNs can serve most digital resources, however, they're most popular for videos, pictures and multimedia content. Also, CDNs encapsulate a wide variety of activities and ensure speed and stability for video streaming, software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, transparent caching, load balancing, cloud intelligence, etc. Some even offer cybersecurity.
CDNs and cloud computing are two different things that share similarities. Cloud computing is a one-stop shop for scaling software solutions across the world at the most cost-effective price you can find while CDNs mostly handle serving content across the world. As I always say, with tech everything depends on use-cases, comparing CDN to cloud computing is like comparing apples and oranges. They're both very useful and are the most preferable choice under different circumstances.
FINALLY
By now it's easy to guess that social media platforms and streaming services own or rent CDNs in order to be able to service clients all over the world. Owning is more expensive than renting, however, some organizations like Facebook sometimes require a bespoke solution along with renting CDNs for some general purposes. You can check out my blog where you will find over 250 articles, I also use the blog to ensure I don't write about the same thing twice 😂😂. See you tomorrow 😉.