A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. The goal is to provide high availability and performance (“speed”) by distributing the service spatially relative to end users.
CDN is an umbrella term spanning different types of content delivery services: video streaming, software downloads, web and mobile content acceleration, licensed/managed CDN, transparent caching, and services to measure CDN performance, Load Balancing, Multi CDN switching and analytics and cloud intelligence. CDN vendors may cross over into other industries like security, DDoS protection and web application firewalls (WAF), and WAN optimization.
Notable content delivery service providers include Akamai Technologies, Edgio, Cloudflare, Amazon CloudFront, Fastly, and Google Cloud CDN.