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Delivery layer · position 8 / 8 · CDN
CDN
Edge cache that serves the actual video file to the player.
"The warehouse closest to your door — keeps the package nearby."
By the numbers
Latency
<50ms TTFB
Scale
>95% cache-hit ratio target
Common vendors
Akamai · Cloudflare · Fastly
In the flow
Where CDN sits
Fun facts
Reshuffle for more — each fact links to its source.
Akamai's name is Hawaiian for 'clever' — the company spun out of an MIT applied-math class taught by Tom Leighton in 1998.
history·MIT story
Cloudflare's free tier alone serves more HTTP requests than Google Search — about 50 million per second at peak.
scale·Cloudflare radar
Fastly's 2021 outage took down the New York Times, Reddit, Amazon and gov.uk for about an hour — traced to a single customer's config flag.
failure·Fastly post-mortem
Receives from (upstream)
Sends to (downstream)
Inputs
- · Encoded media file
Outputs
- · Bytes to the user’s player
Protocols on the wire
HTTPHLS / DASHRange requests
Key KPIs
Cache hit ratioTime-to-first-byte
Appears in lifecycle
Featured in scenarios
Under the hood
Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly. For SSAI, the manifest manipulator stitches ad segments into the content manifest at the CDN edge so the client sees one seamless stream.
Active recall
Test what you know about CDN.