What is CDN and why is it important?
Some popular websites such as NYT, Bloomberg, Reddit, & Amazon were briefly inaccessible on June 8. An outage at Fastly, a content delivery network (CDN) powering the websites. CDNs are geographically distributed networks of servers/data centres. Imagine this. You are in India and order from Amazon. Expectation is you can add anything to cart and checkout instantly without any wait. That wouldn't be possible without firms like Fastly that cache (component storing data for future request) content from origin servers, say in US, and store them close to users world over. An outage in Fastly will hit sites dependent on it as cache may become inaccessible to users. That's what happened recently.