System Design Interview Topic: Content Delivery Network

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January 26, 2023

Distributed Systems  System Design Interview 

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver web content to a user based on their geographic location. The goal of a CDN is to provide faster delivery of content to users by caching content in multiple locations around the world.

The system is composed of a number of components:

  1. Origin Server: This is the main server which stores the original content.
  2. Edge Servers: These are the servers located in different geographical locations which store copies of the content.
  3. DNS Server: This is the server which resolves the domain name to the IP address of the edge server closest to the user.
  4. Load Balancer: This is the component which distributes the requests to the edge servers.
  5. Content Delivery Network: This is the network of edge servers which deliver the content to the user.

The system works as follows:

  1. The user requests a web page from the origin server.
  2. The DNS server resolves the domain name to the IP address of the edge server closest to the user.
  3. The load balancer distributes the requests to the edge servers.
  4. The edge servers deliver the content to the user.

The advantages of using a CDN are:

  1. Improved performance: By caching content in multiple locations, users can access content faster.
  2. Reduced bandwidth costs: By caching content in multiple locations, the origin server does not need to serve all requests.
  3. Increased scalability: By caching content in multiple locations, the system can handle more requests.
  4. Improved security: By caching content in multiple locations, the system is less vulnerable to attacks.

*** Created by ChatGPT on Jan 26, 2023.