Content Delivery Network - Why?

This presentation focuses on the gains of CDN and why every single HTTP request should be going through a CDN.

Transcript

1. Content Delivery Network: Why? Celestine Omin • 09.23.2016
2. About Me. Celestine OMIN Senior Technical Consultant, Andela @cyberomin
3. What is a CDN?
4. What’s a CDN? “A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers deployed in multiple data centers. “ - Wikipedia
5. Reverse Proxy Nginx Varnish HAProxy Apache mod_proxy
6. Typical User Request - CDN Request: • A user contacts a DNS and DNS redirects the user to the CDN POP(Point of presence) • CDN pop get the request and checks to see if it has the content, if it does, it sends it back to the user • CDN pop doesn’t have the request, it contacts Origin. • Origin returns the content, CDN POP caches the content and passes content on to the user. User C D N DNS Origin
7. CDN in Action
8. Why should you care about CDN? Performance. • Latency Every cache miss results in an extra round trip which in turns degrades the application performance.
9. Content with and without CDN
10. Why should you care about CDN? Security. • DDoS The CDN takes care of every DDoS attacks thrown at you and your application almost never has to feel this. • Firewall rules You can setup rules that block request from a given location; China & Russia for instance.
11. Almost impossible to respond to this
12. Why should you care about CDN? Availability. • Cache With your application cached on multiple POP worldwide, when you main application goes offline, your cached version is served. Cloudflare does this excellently. • Traffic Surge Surge arising from breaking news
13. Traffic Surge from breaking news
14. CDN Providers AWS CloudFront Cloudflare Fastly Akamai Google
15. Big Question: will you use this?
16. Use Case Static Content Ideal for storing static contents; Images, stylesheets and javascripts. All though, you should minify your JS and CSS first. User Specific Content Pre-generated HTML pages stored for a user after an authentication process. Ideal for big publishing houses with paywall; FT, WSJ, etc
17. Final note: Don’t build your own CDN.
18. Thank YOU. Celestine Omin.