A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of servers distributed over several regions of the world. The goal of a CDN is to have highly available content which is served fast to end users.
A content delivery network (CDN) is a system of servers distributed over several regions of the world. The goal of a CDN is to have highly available content which is served fast to end users.
Scrivito utilizes the Amazon CloudFront CDN to speed up content delivery independently of your website visitors' location.
Note that you can, additionally or alternatively, use Scrivito's BinaryRewrite API to integrate your own CDN for binary data.
By default, all your content is stored in European data centers. Due to network latency, web requests from Europe are served faster than from anywhere else.
If operated without a CDN, your website would have a varying performance globally and might feel unresponsive in parts of the world. This can be a problem if your audience is international and/or your content is not targeted to a specific region of the world. Additionally, your business would be more vulnerable to a failing data center because your content is stored in only one place.
With a CDN, your public images, documents, and other binary content in your CMS are distributed across the globe, closer to your end users. This greatly reduces the network latency of web requests made by end users, reducing your page load times. The distribution across the Internet also significantly increases the availability of your content because it is stored redundantly in several locations. Additionally, the web server is freed from having to deliver large amounts of content, giving it room for completing other tasks (e.g. processing images) earlier.
These positive effects can even be amplified by having local JavaScript, CSS, and other assets delivered by the CDN as well. There's a detailed Rails Guide available on how to configure your Rails app accordingly.
Scrivito's CDN integration is fully transparent, meaning that nothing needs to be done in your application or elsewhere to benefit from it. Whenever binary content is uploaded using, for example, the Content Browser, it is automatically transferred to the CDN, utilizing automatically generated URLs which are then rendered into the links on your web pages. Scrivito even further accelerates your website by using different hostnames for the same piece of content to circumvent client-side restrictions on the number of simultaneous requests to the same host.