Guided Lab Brief

CDN & Edge: Global Content Delivery

Add a CDN to serve static assets from edge locations worldwide, dramatically reducing latency for global users.

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Overview

Add a CDN to serve static assets from edge locations worldwide, dramatically reducing latency for global users.

Your servers are in US-East, but users are in Tokyo, Mumbai, and São Paulo.

You will build 4 architecture steps that model production dependencies.

You will run 1 failure experiment to observe bottlenecks and recovery behavior.

Success target: CDN serves 90%+ of requests, origin handles <200 rps, global latency <50ms.

Learning Objectives

  • Understand how CDNs cache content at edge locations worldwide
  • Know how DNS routing directs users to the nearest edge server
  • Learned about cache hit rates and their impact on origin load
  • Experienced the difference between edge-served and origin-served latency

Experiments

  1. Set CDN cache hit rate to 20% to simulate poor caching configuration

Failure Modes to Trigger

  • Trigger: Set CDN cache hit rate to 20% to simulate poor caching configuration

    Observe: At 20% hit rate, 1600 of 2000 rps hit your origin server. The origin is overwhelmed and latency spikes. Users worldwide experience slow loading. You're paying for CDN but getting almost no benefit.

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