Networks for content delivery and cloud computing.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) and data center networks are critical infrastructures for the modern internet. A CDN is a geographically distributed platform of servers designed to provide faster and more reliable delivery of web content to users. The core idea is to cache content (like images, CSS files, videos) at multiple locations, or Points of Presence (PoPs), around the world. When a user requests content from a website that uses a CDN, the request is automatically redirected to the CDN server that is geographically closest to the user. This significantly reduces the physical distance the data has to travel, which lowers latency and speeds up page load times. CDNs also improve reliability and scalability by distributing the traffic load across many servers, protecting the origin server from traffic spikes. A data center is a physical facility that houses a large number of servers, storage systems, and networking equipment to run applications and store data. The network inside a data center is highly specialized, designed for massive scale and extremely high performance. Data center networks typically use a topology like a Clos network (or spine-and-leaf), which provides high bandwidth and low latency between any two servers in the data center. This is crucial for modern cloud applications, where different components of an application may be running on different servers and need to communicate with each other constantly. Technologies like Virtual Extensible LAN (VXLAN) are used to create scalable virtual networks for different tenants within the same physical infrastructure.