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Content Delivery Networks

Edge caching, origin offload, spike absorption and dynamic content.

8Questions
11Flashcards
6Terms
Drill this topic All of Networking
Questions

8 to work through

  1. intermediate

    A social platform serves large volumes of user-generated media with an extremely skewed popularity distribution and a cost-sensitive business. How should the delivery path be designed?

    2 min answer
  2. intermediate

    You put a CDN in front of your site. Cache hit rate is 12%. Origin load is barely reduced. Why?

    2 min answer
  3. advanced

    A design platform's shared template suddenly goes viral, and one asset receives millions of requests within minutes. How should CDN caching, origin shielding, request collapsing, stale-while-revalidate and cache warming work together?

    3 min answer
  4. advanced

    A media company plans a global live event and its CDN partner cannot guarantee capacity in one region. How should multi-CDN steering, origin shielding and per-region bitrate caps combine — and how do you prevent steering oscillation?

    2 min answer
  5. advanced

    A video platform receives a viral upload generating millions of playback requests within minutes. How should edge caching, origin shielding, cache warming, request collapsing, transcoding priority and storage access interact?

    2 min answer
  6. advanced

    After a content purge, your origin receives 400× normal traffic and falls over. The CDN is working as configured. What is missing and how do you fix it?

    2 min answer
  7. advanced

    Design the playback path for a global video streaming service. What are the architecturally significant decisions?

    2 min answer
  8. advanced

    Netflix places Open Connect appliances inside ISP networks and pre-positions content onto them during off-peak hours. Why is this fundamentally different from a conventional pull-through CDN, and what does it require from the content catalogue?

    2 min answer
Terminology

6 terms in this topic

protocol

Cache-Control

The HTTP header directing how a response may be cached and for how long, by browsers, proxies and CDNs.

 pattern

Content Pre-Positioning

Pushing predicted-demand content to edge caches during off-peak hours rather than fetching it on first request, converting an unpredictable peak-time…

 practice

Content Purge Path

A separate, fast, fail-closed mechanism for removing content from every cache tier, which is what allows long TTLs everywhere else without making rem…

 case-study

Global Map Serving: Precomputed Tiles at Planet Scale

Rendering a map view on demand is impossible at global scale, so the world is precomputed into a pyramid of cacheable tiles addressed by coordinate a…

 practice

Origin Shield

An intermediate cache tier between edge locations and origin, so that hundreds of simultaneous edge misses become a handful of origin requests.

 pattern

Progressive Media Materialisation

Generating only a baseline media rendition on upload and producing higher-quality variants on first demand - trading a slower first view of unpopular…
Networking

Neighbouring topics

Networking

General material on the network path underneath an architecture.

4 quiz 13 cards 14 terms

TCP/IP

Handshakes, congestion control, head-of-line blocking and connection reuse.

3 quiz 9 cards 2 terms

HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 & HTTP/3

Multiplexing, prioritisation and the transport each is built on.

4 quiz 11 cards 5 terms

DNS

Resolution, TTL behaviour, traffic steering and failover latency.

5 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

TLS & Certificates

Encryption, integrity, authentication, termination points and expiry.

6 quiz 7 cards 5 terms

Layer 4 vs Layer 7

Connection-level versus request-level balancing, and what each unlocks.

4 quiz 10 cards 3 terms

Reverse Proxies

One place for TLS, routing, caching, compression and rate limiting.

3 quiz 9 cards 5 terms

Firewalls & Security Groups

Default-deny, stateful rules, and restricting egress as well as ingress.

5 quiz 8 cards 3 terms

NAT & Egress

Outbound-only connectivity, its per-gigabyte cost and its zone binding.

4 quiz 11 cards 4 terms

VPC Design

Address planning, peering and the ranges you can never resize.

3 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

Subnetting

Tiering, zone binding, and sizing for an address-hungry platform.

3 quiz 9 cards 3 terms

Routing & BGP

How traffic finds you, anycast, and route withdrawal as a failure mode.

2 quiz 8 cards 5 terms

Service Mesh Networking

Sidecar proxies supplying mTLS, retries and traffic policy.

4 quiz 11 cards 3 terms

WebSockets & Realtime

Persistent bidirectional connections and the capacity model they impose.

6 quiz 13 cards 6 terms

gRPC Transport

HTTP/2 multiplexing, binary encoding and streaming semantics.

4 quiz 12 cards 3 terms

API Gateways

The single entry point, and the business logic that must stay out of it.

3 quiz 10 cards 4 terms

Network Performance

Latency floors, bandwidth-delay product, and what no code change fixes.

5 quiz 13 cards 5 terms

Private Connectivity

Private endpoints, peering and dedicated links to managed services.

4 quiz 7 cards 3 terms

Network Troubleshooting

Flow logs, packet paths, and localising a problem to a hop.

6 quiz 8 cards 3 terms