The Modern CDN Means Complex Decisions for Developers
March 5, 2025
Whether you were building a web site or an application, hosting choices used to be about bandwidth, latency, security and availability (as well as cost), with content delivery networks (CDNs) handling static assets and application delivery networks relying on load balancing for scale.
All those things still matter, but there are also many more choices to take into account — from the backend implications of frontend decisions, to where your development environment lives. CDNs have become complex, multilayer distributed computing systems that might include distributed databases, serverless functions and edge computing. What they deliver is less about static (or even dynamic and personalized) assets and more about global reach, efficiency and user experience.
Source: The Modern CDN Means Complex Decisions for Developers
Mary Branscombe at the New Stack looks at the modern CDN, which do much more than deliver large static assets quickly.
