A Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network, abbreviated to CDN, is a network of computers that can contain copies of information. Computers on the CDN can demand data indicate already have from other computers on the network that then can be delivered.

 

If, for example, someone wanted to do a live video transmitted from London that has site visitors from worldwide attempting to watch at the same time. This would put a massive load on the streaming server delivering the media, in this example a video stream. Picture if the viewers of this webcast wanted to watch from Australia, New York, Los Angeles and Japan. The streaming server in London would have to broadcast this live movie stream to all those locations which means the video streams would have to 'hop' many times before reaching their places on the various regions. Streaming Server This compromises the velocity of delivery and places a massive load on the internet connection being employed by the streaming storage space. In addition, it means the video clip stream may experience 'packet corruption' or even 'packet loss' meaning the quality of the video being watched could be jeopardized. This is certainly more relevant if the broadcast is using UDP. If the broadcast is being done over TCP there are more 'load' issues because there is a continuous communication between server and client.

 

So the answer to this matter is to have a 'Point of origin' machine that takes the original video stream, which then goes by it on to 'Point of presence' servers, or PoPs, around the world after request. So now our streaming server in London does not have to deliver to Quotes, New York, Oregon and Japan as in our above example. A visitor that would like to watch the video stream in Australia would use the same online player as people in London to watch the video, but now the player is looking at a CDN for a stream rather than the single streaming storage space in London. The CDN would know from the requesting IP address that the request is coming from Australia and would request the video supply from a 'Point of presence' server nearest to Australia. If that flow would not exist, probably because it is not requested from this location before, the 'Point of presence' storage space would request it from the 'Origin server'. This process would be the same for the audiences in New York, Los Angeles and Japan.

 

The benefits of this are that the workload to broadcast the video stream is well balanced across many servers rather than just one. The bandwidth is also balanced because all the streams are not coming from the same source, which means more concurrent users can see the video stream with much larger stability. Almost all the CDN servers, the 'Point of origin' and the 'point of occurrence servers', are strategically positioned around the world with an internet backbone making the delivery speed between servers extremely fast and reliable.

 

Content delivery networks are not bound to only discussing the load of movie and audio tracks streams. We are able to share images and PDF files in the same way. In fact any digital media can be requested over a CDN. We are not only restricted to media being distributed over a CDN, websites can be cached which obviously makes for faster delivery around the world. This will be significant for corporate websites which may have millions of visits.

 

Another good thing about utilizing a CDN is that once your digital media is on the 'Origin' servers or on the 'Point of presence' servers, it is effectively backed up. If a client requests data from a CDN server that is down, the CDN can produce a request to another storage space on the network and is still able deliver the media.

 

Not what I actually would like to point out about using Content material Delivery Networks would be that the 'Point of origin' servers can be your company's machines in your company's storage space farm. They do not have to be a CDN server. This practice is not recommended by most CDN's as it is more likely to be your company's storage space that is down or experiencing connection issues rather than a CDN server. The one good thing about having your own 'Point of origin' server is it does allow you to maintain local backups of your content if you need to.