The Centralized Cloud (Origin)
Traditional cloud computing (IaaS, PaaS) centralized resources into massive data centers located in specific geographical regions (e.g., us-east-1).
While this provides immense scalable compute power, users far away from the data center experience high latency due to the physical speed of light and network transit time.
The Distributed Edge (CDNs)
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) solve this by pushing data to the "Edge"—thousands of smaller servers located in points of presence (PoPs) globally, physically closer to end-users.
When a user requests a resource, they are routed to the nearest Edge server via Anycast routing. If the Edge server has the data (Cache Hit), it serves it instantly. If not (Cache Miss), it fetches it from the Origin.