Primitive

CDN

A content delivery network that caches content at edge locations close to users to cut latency and offload origins.

Description

The CDN services (AWS CloudFront, GCP Cloud CDN, Azure Front Door / CDN) all cache content at globally distributed edge locations and offer TLS termination and DDoS absorption. They differ in the size and geography of their edge-location footprint, their caching and invalidation controls, and how much routing and security logic runs at the edge — Azure Front Door and CloudFront (with Lambda@Edge / Functions) lean toward an application-edge platform, while GCP Cloud CDN couples tightly to its global load balancer. To the best of our knowledge the practical choice follows your origin location, edge-compute needs, and existing provider rather than cache capability alone.

Capabilities

  • Cache static and dynamic content at the edge
  • Reduce latency by serving from nearby PoPs
  • Offload traffic from origin servers
  • TLS termination and DDoS absorption at the edge

Vendor implementations

Icon-Architecture/64/Arch_Amazon-CloudFront_64
AWS CloudFront
Icon_24px_CDN_Color
GCP CDN
Icon-web-43
AZ CDN

Related primitives