A content delivery network (CDN) improves normal website functions and increases customer satisfaction. The following are some example use cases.
High-speed content delivery
By combining static and dynamic internet content delivery, you can use CDNs to provide your customers with a global, high-performing, whole-site experience. For example, Reuters is the world’s largest news wholesaler to top channels such as BBC, CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The news media challenge for Reuters is to deliver news content promptly to customers around the globe. Reuters uses Amazon’s CDN service, Amazon CloudFront, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to minimize dependence on satellite link communication and create a cheaper, highly available, and secure globally distributed network platform.
Real-time streaming
CDNs help reliably and cost-effectively deliver rich and high-quality media files. Companies streaming video and audio use CDNs to overcome three challenges: reduce bandwidth costs, increase scale, and decrease delivery time. For example, Hulu is an online video streaming platform owned by the Walt Disney Company. It uses Amazon CloudFront to consistently stream more than 20 GBps of data to its growing customer base.
Multi-user scaling
CDNs help support a large number of concurrent users. Website resources can manage only a limited number of client connections at a time. CDNs can rapidly scale this number by taking some of the load from the application server. For instance, King is a gaming company that builds socially connected, cross-platform games that can be played anytime, anywhere, and from any device. King has over 350 million players at any time, and they play 10.6 billion games a day on the platform.
King’s game applications record users’ game data on central data centers, allowing them to play on different devices without losing progress. The data centers aim to give users a consistent experience, even if users join the game on old machines with limited bandwidth.
King uses Amazon CloudFront to deliver hundreds of terabytes of content daily, with spikes to half a petabyte or more when it launches a new game or initiates a large-scale marketing program.