Tutorials System Design Tutorial
CDN Architecture Patterns — Complete Guide
CDN Architecture Patterns — Complete Guide: free step-by-step lesson with examples, common mistakes, and interview tips — part of System Design Tutorial on Toolliyo Academy.
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System Design Tutorial · Lesson 14 of 100
CDN Architecture Patterns
Basics → Scale → Interview
Basics · 1 — Building blocks · ~6 min · Module 2: Networking and Traffic Management
What is this?
A CDN caches static (and sometimes dynamic) content at edge PoPs close to users to cut latency and origin load.
Why should you care?
ShopNest product images and JS bundles should not all hit the origin in Mumbai for a user in Bengaluru — or abroad.
See it live — copy this example
Sketch the architecture on paper. These lessons focus on concepts and trade-offs.
User → Edge PoP → (HIT) image bytes
↘ (MISS) Origin / blob store
Cache: /static/*, image thumbnails
Bypass CDN: POST /checkout, personalized HTML (or use edge with care)Run Example »
This lesson uses terminal or setup steps. Run commands on your computer — the live editor appears on coding lessons.
What happened?
- Cache-Control and URL versioning decide freshness.
- HTML that is highly personalized often bypasses CDN; immutable hashed assets cache hard.
Practice next
- List ShopNest assets that belong on CDN.
- Choose hashed filenames for JS/CSS.
- Set long TTL for immutable assets.
- Add image resize at edge (concept).
- Purge strategy for a bad image upload.
Remember
CDN shrinks latency and origin load. Immutable assets cache aggressively. APIs usually bypass.
ShopNest static on CDN
Product images served from edge PoPs.
Outcome: Origin bandwidth drops; PDP loads faster.
Interview prep for this lesson
Practice these questions aloud after reading—each links to a full structured answer.
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