Definition
CDN
A Content Delivery Network — a globally distributed network of servers that delivers web content to users from the nearest geographic location.
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) caches and serves static assets — images, CSS, JavaScript, videos — from edge servers located close to end users, reducing latency and offloading traffic from your origin server. Major CDN providers include Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, and Vercel's Edge Network. Beyond static assets, modern CDNs offer edge computing, DDoS protection, and dynamic content acceleration. CDNs are one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort performance improvements available — yet AI-generated applications frequently serve all assets directly from the origin server, forcing users on the other side of the world to wait for every request to travel to a single data center and back.
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