Quick access to any website is highly appreciated nowadays. Nobody wants to spend too much time waiting for images to load. Image CDN or Content Delivery Network is a modern tool aimed at facilitating image loading and, as a result, saves the time of the customer.
CDN Basics
CDN is an essential tool that is used on almost every website. Its popularity is driven by the opportunities it delivers. Therefore, let’s analyze the core processes of its work and understand what is the major principle of its functioning. Firstly, CDN is a tool that helps to speed up the time required for loading the page with images. The thing is that images usually take too much time to load. On the contrary, the CDN has these images already loaded and stored in the system.
Consequently, when the person from China, for instance, decides to open the website hosted on the server located in Australia, they will not need to wait hours to see the image. All the time required to load the photo and send it from Australia to China is excluded from the loading time. Consequently, the website gets downloaded in a few seconds, as all images hosted in any site are already loaded for any user who utilizes image CDN.
Structure of Image CDN
Generally, a CDN is meant to improve the user experience by providing optimization needed to speed up the process of content download. There are giant networks that deliver content all over the Internet. The system works pretty clear: basically, the content is downloaded right from the service that is located as close to the user as possible. Image CDN is also a content delivery network that ensures the fast download of images, but its approach is different. With this in mind, let’s take a look at how the image CDN functions.
– Delivering of Image
The idea of speeding up the delivery of visual content is made possible by image optimization. This is enabled by choosing the correct sizing, format, and other parameters of the pictures.
– Image Modification
So, the main function of the image CDN is the modification of pictures. It offers a possibility to change the capacity of an image, crop it, or change the format. As a result of using the image CDN, you can get automatically generated pictures, that are 100% adapted for usage on the site. For example, you can get an image of small size and high-quality at the same time. However, the functionality of the image CDN is not limited by that. For instance, some services enable such functions as an object, color, or face recognition.
– Image Storage
It is known that images are stored in the CDN web to enable the customers to load and implement them quickly and effortlessly. Nonetheless, there is one more feature of pictures in this network: the customer can operate them and change within the storage, if necessary. For this, the CDN system owes a number of libraries. Such an opportunity enables the comfortable implementation of images to various websites and their convenient implementation.
CDN Functions
– Security
This function is usually not crucial for common users. At the time, this function is vital for large enterprises that understand how important it is to secure their data. The thing is that an edge server is the first layer that admits the upcoming traffic. The CDN locks out search requests from malicious customers and refuses to provide access to the website. Consequently, it prevents the company’s server from both bad traffic or connection and viruses. As a result, the server sees only good search requests from real customers and is prevented from bad or insecure traffic. This function is a basic one for the CND and it can be used by any CDN’s user.
Among the other advanced functions of CDN are protection from bots, protection from DooS, WAF, etc. They are mostly used by huge companies, as the installation of such functions is usually expensive and difficult. Moreover, such progressive functions are actually unnecessary for the ordinary user.
– Quick Access
The most common function of CDN that is available for everyone is quick access to the website. Availability is an additional opportunity for CDN usage. It means that the website can be still active during the whole time while you stay logged in.
There are at least two benefits of CDN within this function: at first, it saves the customer’s traffic and a second, the content can be loaded even if the customer’s services fail to work properly.
Summary
CDN is a convenient tool that helps the customers to have quick access to the websites all over the planet Earth, to operate and modify images depending on one’s tastes and searching requirements, and to store images in so-called CDN libraries. Moreover, CDN offers one more brilliant function — it secures the traffic of the user. It is not too difficult to understand the core principles of CDN, though it can be used for both individual users and big corporations. It is multifunctional, and its feature depends on the type of CDN network — whether for an individual user or not. Meanwhile, it is impossible to overestimate the essential features of CDN.
