Re:What is a CDN? How do CDNs work?
by animesh371g on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:39AM
(#34705658)
Much of the ops related to high availability is also abstracted now since Cloud is extensively used and managed solutions are employed instead of having bare metal deployments. The era before cloud was radically different, now we don't hear the word downtime so often.
If you care mostly about reads, the above setup can be operationally simpler and likely more cost effective and agnostic than a full suite of Cloud products.
Re:What is a CDN? How do CDNs work?
by animesh371g on Wednesday February 08, 2023 @03:57AM
(#34705798)
Yes, depends on the product that is being built and the traffic it is going to server. In case it's not a high traffic website, we can definitely bypass Cloud. In my stint at a startup, we were directly serving the content via Nginx instead of CDN. Our scope was limited to only country and the use case was also simple, just to display a transaction page with few images to the customers.
In more general terms:
A distributed reverse proxy with sensible defaults for caching.
Even though it doesn’t sound like much, it’s pretty cool and useful.
One of the things in ops that can be hard and expensive is any kind of high availability. Say you’re restarting your origin server regularly after pushing new code.
Depending on your use case, it might just be enough to have exactly two well provisioned web servers (VM/dedicated) and maybe one DB server. Then put a CDN in front of it and voila, high availability reads.