Do I need a CDN ?
By Elmalla A. on November 28, 2017
Originally written for i-Awcs.
What is a Content Delivery Networks or CDN ?
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 distribute service spatially relative to end-users to provide high availability and high performance. CDNs serve a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.
CDNs are a layer in the internet ecosystem. Content owners such as media companies and e-commerce vendors pay CDN operators to deliver their content to their end users. In turn, a CDN pays ISPs, carriers, and network operators for hosting its servers in their data centers.
The term 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 and WAN optimization
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What is top reasons for using a CDN ?
The number one reason for using a CDN is to improve your user’s experience in terms of speed, and as we know – speed matters!
Ensuring a consistent experience for all your users is important. A website may be hosted in a particular region, but have the majority of its users coming from an entirely different region – for example, if your site is hosted in North America, GTmetrix might report fast speeds based on our default test location, but if a good chunk of your users come from Europe, their speed will not be as fast as you experience it to be.
A global CDN would allow users from a European point of origin to download static content from a closer source. Instead of spanning the Atlantic ocean to retrieve data, they can connect to a server in say, London, UK, to get the same data. This reduces latency and provides a faster loading of your website.
CDNs not only ensure a faster experience to your users, but they also help to prevent site crashes in the event of traffic surges – CDNs help to distribute bandwidth across multiple servers, instead of allowing one server to handle all traffic. Start Here
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Incapsula History
Incapsula was founded in 2009 by Gur Shatz and Marc Gaffan. The company originally operated under the company Imperva (NYSE:IMPV), an American-based cyber security company who owned 85% of the company. It was spun out from Imperva in 2009 and reported to be growing at a rate of 50% per quarter as of August 2013. In February 2014 Imperva bought the remaining part of Incapsula and it became a product line within the parent company.
Incapsula was attributed with protecting against one of the Internet's largest attacks on a website as of October 2013. The attack was said to have lasted nine hours with 100Gbit/s of traffic at its peak. The attack was against BTC China, a bitcoin and yuan trading platform.
In December 2016 Incapsula revealed that it had again defended against its largest DDoS attack, peaking at over 650Gbit/s and 200Mpps.
Elmalla A. (@elmalla) is Chief Sales Officer at i-AWCS, which focuses on web application security solutions.