Amazon CDN is a delivery network service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. It speeds up the distribution of static and dynamic web content like image files, .css, .html to end users. Edge locations are used to deliver the content with low latency to users. Edge location is where cached the frequently accessed or requested data by users.
Why should Content Delivery / Distribution Network (CDN) be used?
Recent surveys on users’ experience on a website’s speed have below conclusions:
- Users will abandon a website that takes longer than a few seconds to load
- Users won’t return to poorly performing websites
CDN addresses these issues. CDN can be understood as a network of geographically dispersed servers to cache copies of content close to end users. It is a way to deliver content from your website to people more quickly and efficiently based on their geographical location.
◦ Let’s say, for example:
If a website’s servers are based in New York city, people in Boston will get the content faster than people in San-Francisco. The farther the customers are from the website’s data center, slower the website loads. This creates an inconsistent and frustrating user experience.
Time lag issue of any length frustrate users who are accustomed to real-time experience.
CDN ensures users download data from servers that are closest in geographical proximity.
Advantages Of CDN
Server Load is decreased
Website traffic gets distributed across multiple caching edge servers, load is balanced between multiple servers. Original server will receive response only from CDN servers and not from users.
Boosts Performance
Time taken to process a user’s request to access any content on the website decreases. CDN shortens the physical distance between user’s location and website’s actual data centers thus improving website’s rendering speed and performance.
Content Delivery is Faster
Website’s on-demand static content like images, videos, CSS stylesheets, Javascripts, etc. are cached to multiple locations.The content is delivered from the cached server instead of the origin server.
Audience Segmentation
A vast amount of data about user end connectivity, device types, browsing experience, etc. is generated by CDN providers. CDN delivers different content to different users based on the kind of device requesting the content.
Reliability Increases & Redundancy Reduces
As the content is spread across multiple cached servers, CDN circumvents hardware failure and network congestion by balancing the traffic load across multiple end servers.
Secure & Cost Effective
CDN is deployed on the edge of the network acting as a virtual high security fence and prevents the website from all kinds of attacks. CDN eliminated the need to pay for costly high-end servers thus saving your business a lot of money.
Details Required
Under this service, we will be setting up Amazon Cloudfront (offered by AWS) for your website. We will need below login credential to proceed with the setup:
- AWS Account Login
- Password
- Your site URL
