Start here if you are new to content delivery or need to explain it to your team. These articles cover the basics only: what a CDN is, how edge servers and points of presence cache content close to users, how DNS and anycast send a request to a nearby node, and what happens on a cache miss when the edge goes back to origin.
The section is written for developers, junior DevOps engineers, product managers and founders who are about to put their first serious traffic behind a CDN. You will also find the protocol groundwork that delivery depends on: TCP handshakes, HTTP keep-alive, ports, IPv6 and DNS records. Once the basics are clear, move on to advanced concepts such as origin shielding, multi-CDN and edge compute.
