CDN
Technology & Computing abbreviation · Internet & Web
| Stands for | Content delivery network |
|---|---|
| Categories | Technology & Computing |
CDN stands for Content delivery network, an Internet & web abbreviation.
A network of servers in many locations that caches and serves website files, images, video and software downloads from a point close to each user, cutting load times and absorbing traffic spikes and DDoS attacks. Cloudflare, Akamai, Fastly and Amazon CloudFront are major CDNs.
Example: Images are served from the CDN, so the origin server barely notices traffic spikes.
Usage notes
Akamai, founded in 1998 out of MIT research, is generally credited as the first major commercial CDN. Because so many sites share a few providers, one CDN outage can take down large parts of the web at once, as in the Fastly outage of June 2021. Browsers now partition their caches by site, so shared CDN copies of popular libraries no longer save downloads across sites.
Related abbreviations
More Internet & web abbreviations
- AMP – Accelerated Mobile Pages
- ARIA – Accessible Rich Internet Applications
- ASP – Active Server Pages
- BBS – Bulletin board system
- BEM – Block Element Modifier
- ccTLD – Country code top-level domain
- CGI – Common Gateway Interface
- CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift
- CMS – Content management system
- CORS – Cross-Origin Resource Sharing
- CSP – Content Security Policy
- CSR – Client-side rendering