How exactly does this work? Do the edge locations only cache the most commonly requested items? What if the edge locations receive requests for many different items, can the edge locations potentially become copies of the origin server then?
afa4
@mangocourage Looking at the figure I think the edge locations cache the content requested by the hosts they are connected to. I think it is possible for the edge locations to potentially become copies of the origin server if the subset of hosts they are connected to request everything that the origin server contains. But I believe in most cases the data in the edge locations would be a subset of the data present in the origin server.
Great post @ChandlerBing. Students might also be interested in reading about Amazon's CloudFront content delivery service.
kayvonf
@mangocourage. Edge locations are caches. And like all other caches, there needs to be an eviction policy to manage what data remains in the cache. If there is no locality in the data requested by clients, requests will end up triggering CDN misses and the data will need to be fetched from the origin server.
How exactly does this work? Do the edge locations only cache the most commonly requested items? What if the edge locations receive requests for many different items, can the edge locations potentially become copies of the origin server then?
@mangocourage Looking at the figure I think the edge locations cache the content requested by the hosts they are connected to. I think it is possible for the edge locations to potentially become copies of the origin server if the subset of hosts they are connected to request everything that the origin server contains. But I believe in most cases the data in the edge locations would be a subset of the data present in the origin server.
Decent explanation of CDNs here: What is a CDN?
Great post @ChandlerBing. Students might also be interested in reading about Amazon's CloudFront content delivery service.
@mangocourage. Edge locations are caches. And like all other caches, there needs to be an eviction policy to manage what data remains in the cache. If there is no locality in the data requested by clients, requests will end up triggering CDN misses and the data will need to be fetched from the origin server.