Software Architect's Handbook

Using content delivery networks (CDNs)

Users visiting a website may potentially be located anywhere in the world. Round trips between clients and servers will take longer if the distance between them is greater. The additional latency may be just milliseconds but it all contributes to the overall time it takes to receive a response.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are a geographically distributed group of servers that can deliver content to users quickly. The nodes of a CDN are deployed in multiple locations so that they are distributed spatially. This provides us with the ability to reduce network latency and serve up content closer to the end users, which improves load times.

CDNs are great for transferring website content, such as JavaScript, ...