Streaming Server

A Content Delivery Network or Content Distribution Network, abbreviated to CDN, is a network of computers that can contain copies of information. Computers on the CDN can ask for data indicate already have from other computers on the network that then can be delivered.

If, for example, someone wanted to do a live video broadcast from London that has guests from around the globe planning to watch at the same time. This would put a massive load on the streaming server delivering the media, in this example a video stream. Imagine if the viewers of this webcast wanted to watch from Australia, New York, Los Angeles and Japan. The streaming server in London would have to broadcast this live movie stream to all those locations which means the video Streaming Servers  would have to 'hop' many times before reaching their places on the various regions. This compromises the velocity of delivery and places a massive load on the internet connection being employed by the streaming machine. Additionally, it means the video stream may experience 'packet corruption' or even 'packet loss' meaning the quality of the video being watched could be compromised. This is more relevant if the broadcast is using UDP. If the broadcast is being done over TCP there are more 'load' issues because there is a frequent communication between server and client.

Thus the answer to this issue is to have a 'Point of origin' machine that takes the original video stream, which then moves it on to 'Point of presence' servers, or PoPs, around the world after request. So now our streaming server in London does not have to deliver to Australia, New York, Oregon and Japan as in our above example. A website visitor that could like to watch the video stream in Australia would use the same online player as people in London to watch the video, but now the player is looking at a CDN for a video stream rather than the single streaming storage space in London. The CDN would know from the requesting IP address that the request is arriving from Australia and would request the video supply from a 'Point of presence' server nearest to Australia. If that flow will not exist, probably because it will not be requested from this location before, the 'Point of presence' storage space would request it from the 'Origin server'. This specific process would be the same for the viewers in Ny, Los Angeles and Japan.

The benefits of this are that the workload to broadcast the video stream is balanced across many servers rather than9124 one. The bandwidth is also balanced because all the streams are not from the same source, which means more concurrent users can see the video stream with much greater stability. All the CDN servers, the 'Point of origin' and the 'point of existence servers', are strategically positioned around the world with an internet backbone making the delivery speed between machines very fast and reliable.

Content material delivery networks are not bound to only sharing the load of video clip and sound streams. We can share images and PDF FORMAT files in the same way. In fact any digital media can be requested over a CDN. We have been not only restricted to media being distributed over a CDN, websites can be cached which obviously makes for faster delivery around the world. This will be significant for corporate websites that contain millions of visits.

Another benefit of utilizing a CDN is that once your digital media is on the 'Origin' servers or on the 'Point of presence' servers, it is effectively backed up. If the client requests data from a CDN server that is down, the CDN can make a request to another server on the network and is still able deliver the media.

The last thing I actually would like to point out about using Articles Delivery Networks is that the 'Point of origin' servers can be your company's web servers in your company's server farm. They do not have to be a CDN server. This practice is not recommended by most CDN's as it is more likely to be your company's server that is down or experiencing connection issues somewhat than a CDN machine. The main one benefit of having your own 'Point of origin' server is it does allow you to maintain local backups of your content when you need to.