Today, CDNs form part of the backbone of the internet. They are crucial for housing and delivering content closer to end users, so it hits their screens faster than it would if it originated from the host server. As such, CDNs have become crucial for upholding the many streaming services and other live-streamed content that we rely on today.
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How CDNs Enable Streaming
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a web of servers positioned across the globe. They receive data from the host server, ready to deploy for users who are closer to those CDN servers. This means that users in Europe won’t have to pull data across the Atlantic Ocean, from an American host server.
Over the past decade, streamed entertainment has become dominant thanks to services like YouTube and Netflix, which have brought streaming into homes all over the planet. Industries like iGaming have also embraced live streaming to host their casino games. With games like Lightning Roulette, the action is broadcast in real-time to players, and managed by a human host. However, latency can be a big problem for live broadcasts because they often rely on interaction and quick responses. If there’s a big delay, it can freeze players out of the stream entirely. That’s where CDNs come in and cut down on latency by broadcasting the stream from a much closer location to the viewer.
Today, most internet traffic travels through CDNs. While they started out as a nice-to-have feature, they became a necessity as the internet made its way across the world. They are managed by companies like Cloudflare but also tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, known as Hyperscalers. Now dedicated video CDNs have been designed specifically to support the streaming industry, by axing latency and shortening buffering times.
Streaming audiovisual data can take a lot of bandwidth. CDNs also help with this, as they stop the host server from getting overrun by stream requests. If the entire audience of a Netflix show tried to pull from the same server at once, the service could suffer, or the server could buckle entirely. This is what happens during DDoS attacks. When that burden is distributed across multiple servers, services run more smoothly. Likewise, this kind of distribution stops the network from breaking its bandwidth restrictions once the stream is up and running.
The Other Benefits of CDNs
There are several other benefits to using CDNs, and many of them pre-date the streaming landscape that exists today. Some of them have been mentioned already, like cutting back on latency or reducing bandwidth consumption. They do this for all content online, not just streams. CDNs cache the scripts and audiovisual assets used by webpages, which are typically the longest to load and most data-intensive. Once they’re cached nearby, those asset-heavy pages will load a lot faster than usual.
CDNs also have major security benefits for professional and amateur website owners. By splitting traffic between servers, sites can function a lot more efficiently and stay up in the event of hardware failure. Routing traffic through a chain of servers also makes it easier to identify any cybersecurity concerns, something called DDoS mitigation that Cloudflare explains in more detail.
Given their importance in delivering online content today, CDNs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, the technology behind CDNs has spurred newer developments like edge computing, where actual computer processes are managed across a network of servers. As online media continues to become the norm for entertainment, CDNs will continue to adapt and get content in the viewers’ hands as fast as possible.
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