Foundations — the journey a request takes, and the words you'll hear — anycast routing to the nearest POP
A CDN is a stack of caches in front of your origin: a request travels from the browser, through DNS and the anycast routing fabric, to the nearest POP (which terminates TLS and may hold a cached copy); only a miss travels on — through an optional shield — to origin.
Scene 00
Foundations — the journey a request takes, and the words you'll hear
- Watch
- Try it
- Predict
- Capture
One request, the whole way down and back. First it's a MISS (origin has the only copy); then the edge has a copy and the next request is a HIT. Names come next — for now just watch the path.
Where this sits in Build a CDN
Scene 00 of 13, in the Edge basics act — The request journey, origin pain, an edge near each user, POPs and anycast.. The whole request path on one diagram — browser → DNS → anycast → POP (the edge cache) → origin — plus a clickable glossary of the core journey terms. Orientation before you touch anything.
Up next. That whole journey exists to avoid one thing — the long trip to a single far-away origin. The next scene makes you feel exactly why that trip is so expensive when there's no cache in the middle.