A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that work together to quickly display Internet content on users‘ devices. The purpose of a CDN is to improve the performance and availability of internet content by caching the content close to the end-users.

A CDN stores cached content in (cloud) servers in locations that are close to the end users, to minimize latency. CDNs are used to deliver various types of content, such as web pages, images, videos, and other media. CDNs emerged in the late 1990s as a means of alleviating the internet’s performance bottlenecks as the internet increasingly became a mission-critical medium for people and businesses. Today, CDNs serve much of the Internet’s content, including web objects (text, images, and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social media sites.