C H A P T E R  5

Content Delivery Networks

This chapter covers a topic that you probably won’t be able to recreate by yourself. Or at least you wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) want to. Content delivery networks (CDNs) have become quite prominent in recent years. The way they work is very simple and this hides some of their intrinsic power.

For example, Peter lives in Hong Kong and is blessed with a 100Mbps Internet connection. When he downloads updates from Microsoft or Apple, he can download at around 10Mbps. The reason is because Hong Kong has awesome connectivity. It is quite realistic for an individual to have a 1Gbps fiber optic network connection here. However, while this provides ping times for Quake 3 in the low single digits, all of this stops at Hong Kong’s border. At this point everything gets shuttled back and forth via relatively slow links, and your lightning-fast connection gives you no advantage.