So what is CDN, anyway?

Think, for a second, about the last website you visited. Or mobile app you recently opened. In fact, imagine pretty much any piece of content you have ever consumed via a digital device. The chances are that the images or video or audio you enjoyed will have been provided by a Content Delivery Network – or ‘CDN’ as it is more commonly known.

A CDN, in simple terms, is a network of servers distributed geographically that combine to deliver content quickly. Sounds familiar, right? That’s exactly what Edge Network does – laces together thousands (millions, even) of digital devices all over the world to share data between users. That data might be for web hosting, it may be digital file sharing or – you guessed it – it might be to facilitate one of the core applications within Edge Network: Edge CDN.

So why is CDN different? It’s all just data, right? That’s definitely true, but the reason why so many digital products – from major content services such as Netflix, Facebook and Amazon to smaller media brands like Empire magazine – use CDNs is to make the delivery of content assets (such as images or video) as efficient as possible.

Now, it just happens that Edge Network does a far more efficient job of distributing data among the world’s population. That’s true for all of the data it processes, but is also true for content such as images and video. And that makes Edge Network an absolutely perfect fit for a CDN.

Not surprising, then, that Edge network has a live CDN product in-market, currently in use by over 70 brands – including Empire and Monocle magazines, a host of digital radio stations and innovative ecommerce applications.

And it’s not only because Edge CDN is superior in terms of performance. It’s also better for the environment – and comes packed with dynamic features such as image manipulation (that’s things like resize, rotate, saturate, sharpen and crop to you and me) and real-time compression to speed up delivery for different digital devices and connections.

Edge CDN is just one of the services provided by Edge Network. For details on the full suite of applications – including Storage and DNS – head up to the ‘Platform’ section in the main navigation of this website. While you’re there, you can also read about how to contribute to the network and earn revenue, subjects also covered in previous episodes of Conversations on the Edge.