CDNs — Why Your Images Load From 50 Places
Understand how Content Delivery Networks work, why they make your site faster, and how to use them effectively.
Open your browser's developer tools on any popular website. Click the Network tab. Look at where the requests go. You'll see your HTML come from one server, but your images, CSS, and JavaScript come from domains like cdn.example.com or assets.example.com. Those assets aren't coming from the same server as your application. They're coming from a CDN — a Content Delivery Network — and they're probably being served from a data center in your city.
A CDN is one of those technologies that's so fundamental to how the internet works that you've been benefiting from it every day without knowing it. Understanding what it does will help you make your own applications faster.
The Problem CDNs Solve
Your web server lives in one place. Let's say it's in Virginia (us-east-1, the center of the
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