As the demand for online content increases, the demand for a critical technology which can deliver video, huge files, and other web content to users quickly and reliably increases. The delay that occurs between the loading of a web page and when the page actually appears is termed to be latency. The latency of a page may be high due to the geographical distance between your computer and the hosting server of the web page and no user can’t wait so long for a content to load and they simply close or navigate to another web application.
CDN’s are evolved to solve such a fundamental problem by accelerating the delivery of content. The cached content on multiple servers are widely distributed across the geographical locations to deliver a range of content to numerous endpoints swiftly in a cost-effective manner.
In this article, let’s have a look on how CDN’s work and the types of CDN deliveries based on the user requirements.
How CDN Work?
Generally, CDN’s are a large network of servers. They reduce the physical stretch between a web server and a user by having the copies of content pulled from the origin server to spread across geographies in storage banks called caches or PoPs. So when a user from the US tries to access French content it can simply be fetched from a local US PoP, instead of routing the content from France. In the nutshell, CDN’s are great in offering a superlative coverage to the users, thereby improving the user experience.
Types Of CDN’s
Based on the purposes, CDN deliveries fall into three categories: General Purpose CDN’s, On-demand Video CDN’s, Live Video CDN’s. Let’s explore in detail each of the categories in detail.
General Purpose CDN
General purpose CDN’s took its form before the emergence of video and you might have come across a general purpose CDN while surfing a popular website or when downloading a software update or when streaming a song on YouTube. They drive the web traffic by retrieving cached content from diverse regions. However, web acceleration has become bit complex and highly fragmented as they rely on a large number of servers worldwide falling along the language lines and country boundaries. The language clusters in a single country can prompt numerous CDNs having the capacity to make advances into different parts of the market.
On-Demand Video CDN
Barely, to curb the number of bits being delivered to the user, CDNs would not really like to spend the additional cost of hardware and streaming software. Hence the formats direct download, progressive download, and HTTP streaming are evolved.
Direct download requires a video to be downloaded before viewing. However, this turns out to be a time-consuming burdensome process for large applications and movies, while shorter clips can be downloaded quickly.
YouTube is a perfect example of progressive download which demands a bit-by-bit download. Here, the viewer can watch a part of the video while the rest being downloaded facilitating concurrent download and utilization of the video. Progressive downloads turn out to be more effective and practical as the speed of the download that is required to deliver the standard-definition content exceeds the bit rate as the internet speed increases.
HTTP streaming technology chokes the on-demand content by dividing it into tiny bits and stream each bit separately. In order to customize a particular stream to a user’s video player, streaming is performed at varying bit rates.
Live Video CDN
Besides other forms of CDN delivery, live video delivery is crucial as the majority of video content delivered by CDNs is on-demand video and live video can’t be cached. Hence the basic CDN infrastructure took a new form as a live streaming CDNs.
These live streaming CDN’s can be fabricated in two ways
Low bandwidth pipes utilizing reflectors for accelerating the content transmission
Ultra-high bandwidth pipes for instant transmission of content to users
Live streaming CDN’s are becoming popular despite being costly during peak user views and the cost cannot be adequately recovered as we cannot expect continuous usage. However, live streaming CDN is expected to rule the sphere by marking itself as mainstream communication.
A CDN can fill in as an enchantment fix in smoothening content transmission to your clients. They offer specific benefits to different types of business sectors such as IT corporates, media, government, finance, e-commerce etc. Get ready to experience a remarkable business experience by integrating CDN to your streaming platform.