1. Introduction: The Big Picture – From Snail Mail to Speedy Delivery The journey of a data packet across the internet can be a surprisingly long and arduous one. Imagine an online service with its main servers, or "origin servers," located in a single, remote data center, perhaps somewhere in a quiet town in North America. When a user in Europe or Asia wants to access a file—say, a small image on a website—that file has to travel a long physical distance. The long journey, fraught with potential delays and network congestion, is known as latency. This can result in a frustrating user experience, a high bounce rate, and an overwhelmed origin server struggling to handle traffic from around the globe. This is where a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes into play. A CDN is a sophisticated system of geographically distributed servers that acts as a middle layer between the origin server and the end-user. 1 Its primary purpose is to deliver web content by bringing it closer to...