CDN
A global cache fabric with PoPs near users.
Origin
Daniel Lewin and Tom Leighton co-founded Akamai at MIT in 1998 based on the consistent-hashing work. Akamai delivered President Clinton's 1999 Grand Jury testimony at scale and proved the model. Cloudflare (2010), Fastly (2011), and the cloud-native CDNs followed.
Where it shows up in production
- Akamai ~360,000 servers in 4,000+ PoPs. Still the largest commercial CDN by capacity.
- Cloudflare ~300 PoPs; pioneered "every customer everywhere" pricing model and edge compute (Workers).
- Netflix Open Connect A private CDN inside ISP networks — serves the vast majority of Netflix traffic at the last mile.
On Semicolony
Sources & further reading
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