Frank DENIS random thoughts.

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2024-05-07 10:30:08

For many people, CDNs are an obvious requirement for any public API or web service. However, I’ve come to realize that for the vast majority, they remain somewhat mysterious - or something they’re unaware of, even though they unknowingly use them daily.

A CDN is a cloud service that can be added in front of existing web servers. Instead of connecting directly to the content servers, clients will connect to the proxy nodes operated by the CDN.

Fastly is a very powerful platform, and fortunately, there’s a wealth of documentation available. While this abundance of documentation is great, it can also feel overwhelming at times. Therefore, what follows are some simple steps to help you get started with Fastly.

Here’s what we’re going to do: set up everything so that https://fastly.example.com acts as a caching layer for https://example.com. When people connect to https://fastly.example.com, they will see exactly the same content, but cached and protected by Fastly.

Note that the origin server doesn’t have to be configured for fastly.example.com. It should never see traffic for that virtual host name; only the CDN will.