Introduction
CDN , CDN Points , CDN Servers and Origin Servers are the common terms used in online industry when there is need of faster data download, less bandwidth consumption and high performance.
But when the things comes in terms of Digital Headend Industry for OTT Headend then we need to consider these terms CDN , CDN points, CDN Servers and Origin Servers. Because in OTT Headend after encryption of data we need to send the encrypted data on different CDN points as we have discussed previously in OTT Headend. This enable us for faster data delivery to subscribers.
Now it have became necessary for us to understand what CDN is , What are CDN Points , What are CDN Servers and what is Origin Server. In this article we will cover these terms.
What Is CDN
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. It is large network of Edge servers connected to each other established in different countries. CDN Points or pops (Points Of presence) represents the locations of these Edge Server. So there is one origin server and multiple CDN servers located at different places.
Each CDN server contains Cache Servers to store the data. This data is stored in the Hard Disks HDD and SSD. A high performance RAM is also installed in these servers to perform these actions.
Types Of CDN
There are basically three types of Content Delivery Networks are,
Static CDN
Static CDN is most expensive one. Static CDN is responsible for delivery of Static HTML and downloadable files
Dynamic CDN
Dynamic CDN is Expensive. Dyanamic CDN is responsible for dynamic and static content with rich media
Multipurpose CDN.
Multipurpose CDN is affordable. Multipurpose CDN is responsible for delivery of dynamic and static content with mobile and rich media.
Working Of CDN
To understand working of Content delivery Network we need to take here a example of website Headendinfo.com .
Hosting server of this website is in somewhere in USA. It can also be known as Origin Server. Now a person who lives in india wants to access this website. Now there is large distance between USA and INDIA. So its request to access this website will go through many routers. So it will take long time to access this website. Same in case of China or any other countries except USA.
To overcome this problem we need to go for CDN Points. As we have discussed above almost in every country there are CDN servers. So if we implement this CDN technique then our website data will be cached in all these CDN servers from origin server. So the person who is accessing this website from India will get it from his nearest CDN server installed in india as per his location.
Same situation is for all other users residing in different countries , will access this website from his nearest CDN server.
Thus we have seen in this technique the data is fetched from origin server and cached in different CDN server.
CDN Data Types And Formats Examples
Photos
JPG, PNG , GIF
Videos
WMV, MP4 (HTML5 VIDEOS) , HLS and MOV
Audios
MP3 and WAV
Others
ZIP, PDF , DOC, JSON, HTML , TXT and XLS
Benefits Of Content Delivery Network
Performance
The data is accessed all over the world so data accessing speed is very good due to nearly located CDN server. It also reduces the latency in network.
Protection
It provide us DDoS attack protection to our data.
Scalability
It improves the scalability because all the incoming traffic is divided on to different CDN servers. So it minimize the chance of hanging of our origin server.
Conclusion
As we have seen above Content Delivery Network plays a very important role in OTT Headend for delivery of services to subscribers. Content Delivery Network is widely adopted when we need to transfer the data at long distance very efficiently. CDN servers are installed in different location all over the globe. These server fetches the updated data from origin server and distribute it all over CDN servers for faster delivery of data to the subscribers. This data can be audio, video and other formats too.
Know More About What Is OTT Headend
