Have you ever wondered what the cloud is? I remember a scene from a Rocky movie where actually I think it was Apollo Creed, the sun. He said, Hey, I'm gonna take a picture of this and put it in the cloud. And Rocky looks up at the sky like, oh my goodness, there's storage in the cloud. No, it's not an actual server in the cloud, but it's basically a reference that's made to a network of servers. 


We're gonna be talking a little bit about that, and we're gonna be talking about content distribution networks in this training. First, we need to understand the basics of a network. When I'm talking about a network, I mean a network of servers. A server is just a very powerful computer. And what makes the internet run is that there's all these servers interconnected all around the globe.


All of them contain data that's accessible through your computer using a software called a browser that's connected to an ISP, which is called an internet service provider. The internet functions as an entire web of interconnected servers through these internet service providers. And mine here in Florida is called Spectrum. 


Maybe yours is Comcast, or whatever the name of your internet service provider is. But what happens is you connect to that internet service provider through your laptop using a software called a browser. Maybe you're using Chrome, or you're using Firefox, or you're using Microsoft Edge or Windows or whatever Microsoft calls their browser nowadays. 


But essentially, you're using that browser on that laptop, on that computer to connect to the web of servers, the interconnected servers all over the world. In all these data centers. You're connecting to them through your internet service provider, and that's how data is transferred back and forth.


Not just data, but the media that sometimes that data makes up. And by media, I mean videos, audios, images, anything that you can now see on your computer screen as a result of that browser program rendering the data that it's receiving from the interwebs, right? So I hope that those basics just kind of refresh your memory about how it all works. 






Now, here's the challenge, when it comes to delivering content all across the world, it's generally speaking the space between these servers and these users. It's, you know, thinking about somebody on a different continent, accessing data, right? 


Essentially, if we were all in the same room and we were interconnected, our computers were interconnected through the wifi, and I just said, oh, well, you know what? I wanna pull a file off of your laptop, but we, and we're connected through our wifi, we have a network connection here.


I could literally just go and open the folder, the shared folder, and just pull that file right off of your computer. It's not traveling more than 20 feet, it's going up as high as the modem and then coming right back down, right? So, it doesn't have to go very far. 


So what if I wanted to play a video in real time on my computer, from your computer? So the file is on your computer, we're in the same room, the file's on your computer, but I'm streaming it from my machine, and we're connected through a server or maybe even a wire. 


Imagine, let's get real basics. Imagine if I could just connect your computer to my computer with an ethernet cable, and now I could play a video on my computer, but the video is really stored on your hard drive, right? So this is the whole premise behind delivering content, right?


So now remove the wire. We can still interconnect our computers using wifi but now remove the wifi and put yourself on another continent. Well, how the heck are we gonna get connected there? How am I gonna pull a video and watch it if it's located on a hard drive or on a computer that's all the way on the other side of the planet, distance between servers and, and users can impact the content delivery speed and the user experience due to latency. 


I'm gonna ask you this. Are you old enough to have experienced trying to watch a video on the internet and it just spins and spins and spins until all of a sudden it catches up and then you can watch another 10 seconds and then it just spins and spins and spins? Yeah. Not the best experience in the world.




As a matter of fact, I can remember back when we were all still on dial-up, and if you wanted to watch a video, you had to leave that thing downloading overnight, hope that you didn't get a call in between, that disrupted the signal of you connecting to the internet, right? Because we used to be on those dial up modems that used to make that funny sound. 


That's the only way that you could watch a video. You'd have to leave it downloading overnight and then have a video player installed on your machine. You know, some people had a movie player. What was it? Windows movie player and QuickTime, and there's like a whole bunch of other ones. 


My point is that this whole thing about delivering content across distances started to become a problem when we didn't have the cloud, when we didn't have these big networks and these big content distribution networks that we're gonna talk about, because the user experience was hindered when we're trying to download something that's stored on a server that's way out in the other side of the world, or even on the other side of the country.


So we started doing things, the internet started doing things like mirroring and copying files and caching files all over and propagating putting things all over in different locations. But what cloud distribution networks did is something really clever, and we're gonna talk about that now. 


What exactly is a content distribution network? A CDN? Well, basically, these are networks of servers. And again, I  explained what a server is. A server is just a really powerful computer, right? Sometimes a server doesn't even have a keyboard or a screen. It's just a rack. It's just an accessible hard drive or a series of hard drives that are connected, and they store information, they store data. 


So picture a huge data center, which is racks and racks and racks of these computers that are just mounted in there. They don't even have keyboards. When a technician wants to access information there, he either has to go right up to the machine directly and plug in a keyboard and plug in a monitor, or you've gotta access that machine remotely from a location somewhere in the data center or even a remote location that's possible as well.


But my point is that imagine all these data centers that contain all of these computers, and they're all over in every state, in every major city, all over the world. You've got all these computers that are called servers, and they're networked together, they're connected through the internet, and there's internet service providers that actually have hard lines, some of them even fiber optic. 


Now we actually have cable internet, right? Broadband, and we have different ways of connecting than just using a telephone line, right? So, the years of the telephone line, that's just an antiquated method. Those telephone modems, we don't even do that anymore. 


Now we do, we use cable modems, we use broadband. There's wifi, there's all different stuff including fiber optic, and we even have satellite internet. There's starlink. And the point is that now the world's gotten a lot smaller because the tech technology's advanced to the point where these networks, these interconnected servers, can now talk to each other a lot easier than back when we were all still on dialup.


And now you've got so many data centers, so many of these computers all over the place that the network is huge. So picture a spider web where every joint in that web is full of computers storing data, and they can all communicate with one another. And if this machine doesn't have the information, they could just talk to the one that's closest and that one can talk to the one that's closest to it, and so on, and so on and so forth. 


So these distribution networks are just servers that are strategically positioned across the globe to deliver content efficiently to users based on their geographic location. Now, think about that, because that's where it's really powerful. 


Let's say you are in Virginia, right? And you're in Virginia and you are logging onto your computer to access a file, right? Maybe you did a Google search and you found the thing you needed and you wanted to download it, but you know what computer that's on?


There's a guy in China that uploaded that. And now that download essentially has to happen from a machine that's in China. So imagine the time that it would have to take just for the signal to travel from China to Virginia in order for you to be able to download that file and think of all the things that could happen to that connection in the time that it would take for the entire file to transfer. 
Having a content distribution network enables that file to be downloaded, even though it initially was uploaded in China, it's been mirrored, and it can be downloaded by even a data center or a computer, a server that's even in Virginia. So now you've shortened the distance, and this is what a content distribution network facilitates. 


Now, in order to truly understand this, we've gotta understand the cloud. And again, just like Rocky made the mistake of thinking that it was actually in the sky, you know, when we talk about the cloud in the sense of networking, it refers to a network of remote servers that are hosted on the internet.


This allows users to store, manage and access data and files from anywhere without the need for physical hardware or on-premises infrastructure. So you don't need to actually have that person sitting next to you and a wire connecting the two computers in order to access that information. 


You'd also don't need to have a wire that's long enough that goes all the way from your computer all the way to China in order to access that file, because it's in the cloud, meaning that file, when it was uploaded, it was mirrored to computers and servers all over the world in a content distribution network. 


And when you, in Virginia, are trying to access that file through that content distribution link, what's gonna happen is that the network is gonna pull the file from the nearest server to you based on your geo location. And that is what makes the cloud awesome.


It's basically a way to remove those, those latencies that are gonna cause delays and downloading, they're causing your videos to buffer and spin and spin. It essentially speeds everything up. And it also allows for infinite scaling, really. 


Obviously the amount of space on the internet is finite, but even with IPV six, there's like a gazillion amount of possible connections. But my point is that you now have the ability as someone that's hosting data that needs to serve data to their clients, you have the ability to continue uploading and uploading and uploading and uploading to the cloud. 


And the way that you're being billed will just increase based on that usage, based on that bandwidth that's being pulled, as opposed to the way that this used to happen traditionally, where you were just renting a space, a partition, so to speak, on a server that's in a rack somewhere.
This has really, really revolutionized the way that we transfer data on the internet. I wanna talk a little bit about the service that I use. Very, very powerful. Now, you might know Amazon as the retail giant, the e-commerce Giant, right? 


Let me tell you something, Jeff Bezos really, really mastered how to buy and well, really how to sell stuff on the internet. Now it's just huge. I mean, they're gonna be delivering things in drones soon, but I don't know when you're watching this or when you're absorbing this training, they may be already delivering things with drones, but the reality is that Amazon has just grown huge. 


It started out as this site that was gonna sell books, and then it turned into, you know, we're gonna sell anything, and then it turned into we're even gonna make stuff that we sell. And then it just turned into, well, we're even gonna ship it ourselves. We're not gonna use the postal service, we're just gonna have our own trucks. 


Now it's this huge commerce giant that makes billions, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. Who knows how much money is transacted? But the reality is that Amazon is much bigger than just the e-commerce website that you know about. 

Amazon is actually a huge, huge tech company that provides a lot of services, and I mean a lot of services for all sorts of tech companies. And one of the things that they have is a cloud system. Amazon has servers all over the world. They have data centers everywhere, and it puts them in a unique position to now be a content distribution network.


I'm gonna talk about two particular products of Amazon, but trust me when I say from their digital product side, they have thousands of services that they offer. Things like hosting, things like cloud distribution, they have a lot of stuff. They even have an AI segment. It's just amazing. Like if you ever go and, and just look up Amazon console and you can see all the different things that they offer. 


But Amazon S3 is a service that I use in conjunction with another one. I'm gonna talk to you in a moment about, and that one's called CloudFront. So Amazon S3 is basically just storage. So you can't compete. Like the amount that they charge in comparison to a regular hosting company is pennies per terabyte. 


You could take so much data like images, pictures, videos, and just host it on, on your Amazon account for pennies. Instead of actually hosting the videos and the images and the files on your own hosting account. You can save so much money by just using Amazon. 


S3 is basically three Ss, a simple storage service. So for short, they call it Amazon S3. I dunno why they don't call it S Cubed, it's just S3. So, simple Storage Service basically provides scalable storage in the cloud. What that means is you're not gonna run out of hosting space, so just keep uploading. You've got the ability to create these buckets is what they're called. 


They have such a huge network that when you decide you wanna store data on your Amazon S3 account, you can tell it where you wanna store it. I wanna store this in Alaska, I wanna store this in Virginia, I wanna store this in London. Like, you can select where you want your bucket to be, and now you can actually retrieve that data and depending on how close you are to the bucket that you created, the time that it's gonna take to download.


And I mean, we're talking milliseconds in more cases, but when you have a lot of people ask, accessing the same file at the same time, which is called bandwidth, that is gonna affect the speed at which it's being served, especially if it's only being served from one plate, right? 


Imagine a whole bunch of people trying to cut pieces of cake at the same time, and there's only one place that they could serve themselves, as opposed to if you have that cake cut and just spread it all across the table in different serving stations, right? 


So essentially what Amazon allows you to do is pick how many places or what place you're gonna put this bucket in. And now you can basically create links right inside of Amazon, just like you would inside of your regular hosting company, right inside of Amazon. You would go, and again, when I say right inside of Amazon, I am not referring to the e-commerce site.


There's a whole other console that you log into in order to access these Amazon services. But again, very, very powerful hosting. This is where we put all of our media, all of our large files, all of our content, because it is just so cheap to do, and it is much more effective than putting this stuff on your hosting. 


Now, unfortunately, they do not serve at this time. You can't use it to host your websites. So this is simply for storage. Now, let's talk about the other service that I mentioned, CloudFront. So this is more about delivery. So Amazon CloudFront is a CDN, like we've talked about. A content distribution network service that seamlessly works in conjunction with Amazon S3, and it delivers content to users with a low latency and a high transfer speed by caching that content in Edge location. 


Let's talk about those big words. I use ‘caching’ that just basically means storing, saving it. It basically takes the content that you uploaded to that one bucket and it mirrors it in a whole bunch of other places all over the world. It is called edge location. So if you upload an image file or a video and you upload it to a particular bucket, you can assign a CloudFront distribution, it's called to that bucket. 


You can go to your CloudFront account and say, okay, create a new distribution, assign that distribution to this bucket. And now CloudFront says, okay, your distribution has been created. Here's a URL for the use distribution, and it works with that bucket. So now what happens is, any file that you put into that bucket, if you add the distribution ID or the distribution URL to that file location, now it's being served from the cloud, from the Content Distribution network.

So what that means is that if I give that URL to someone that's in China, that person clicks that URL to access that video. They're gonna be accessing it from the nearest server to them in China, maybe Beijing or Tokyo, wherever the heck they might be. 


This is gonna be pulled from the closer location, even though it's again, the same file that I uploaded to a bucket in Virginia because I added that CloudFront distribution to it's going to be served to them from whatever nearest location or edge location is storing that file to them. 


So essentially a copy of the file is made and in the background, right when I upload it, and it's sent to all these other locations so that when somebody tries to access that file anywhere in the world, the first thing that CloudFront does is say, okay, where are you? Okay, you're at IP so and so, and says, okay, where's the nearest location of this file? Okay, it's at IP, so-and-so alright, let me serve it to you from this IP. 


Instead of like making a path all the way through the web and going to North Virginia or wherever the heck it is. No, it's going to the nearest edge location, pulling the file from there. That eliminates that long download time or that long, you know, buffering time for that video to stream. Very, very powerful. 


When you combine the power of Amazon S3 storage with the speed of Amazon CloudFront content delivery, here's a little image of what I just explained, because my mind thinks in pictures. This picture starts on the right hand side. See that little guy that looks real happy because he is using CloudFront, okay? So that little guy's got his computer.


That guy made a video, he made a video, and then he uploaded it to his website. And that website is the origin connection that is located on a server near him. So let's say he's in London, that guy's a British guy, shouldn't have drawn a little British flag there. 


What happens is, this guy over here now, he says, well, I uploaded this video and I have it over here, but there's this other guy, he's in New York. I didn't draw a picture of that guy, but that guy in New York, he needs to access that information. There's a far, there's a big ocean in between London and New York, right? 


And what needs to happen now is this file needs to get served over there, but what's happening is he's using a content distribution network. So his ISP basically puts it over on the nearest server to him, right?


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He now is using Amazon or is using any other cloud service and content distribution network. There are many by the way, and it's gonna basically put it in all different edge locations. So here's one location in the cloud, here's another location in the cloud, here's another location in the cloud. 




This one just seems to be the one closest to this user in New York, right? So that one's in New York. And by the way, this means mail server, pop server. I don't remember what pop stands for. I think it's postal originating, but I don't remember what pop is. But it's basically a server or a mail server. It's a server.


Essentially what happens now is this is an edge location where that file is being stored, and a copy of that file is being stored here, and a copy of that file is being stored here, and a copy of that file is being stored here. And because the New York user is closest to this particular server, that's where it's gonna be served from. 


It doesn't get served from here when he clicks on that video, it doesn't have to travel across the ocean. Instead, it just shoots right up to the cloud and grabs it right from the New York server because he's in New York, right? So that's essentially the way that the cloud works and how a content distribution network works.


Amazon S3 stores the original file while Amazon CloudFront distributes these files to those edge locations worldwide, ensuring faster content delivery to users all over the world. Now, there's a lot of benefits to using CDNs, right? See? And there's a lot of them. There's Amazon Cloud front and there's more. 


But this is gonna improve the website performance because think about this, think about not just the media that's being served. What about all the images on your website? What about the header image, the footer image, the background image, all the icons, all the media, all the photos, anything and everything. 


If you have a gallery on your website, anything and everything that's on your site, when that site first loads, if it's pulling it from a server that's far away, that site is gonna load really slowly. And what your browser does, by the way, you may or may not know this, your browser has a local case. 


So when a browser loads a site, it realizes, oh wow, this site took a long time to load. Let me save a version of this website on this browser case so that if the user ever visits it, again, I can just serve these images right from the case and I don't have to give them a bad user experience and make them load these images all the way from China or Virginia, or whatever the heck they're being served from.


So again, there's a cache that's inside of your browser, but what happens when you're using a CDN, it's caching in the verb tense, that media, that all those files, all that data in edge locations all around the world. So it's gonna improve your word and your website's performance by loading it faster. 


It's gonna reduce latency, it's gonna enhance the user experience by serving that content from a place that's closest to them. There's other CDNs out there, like Google. Google is huge. Google Cloud, are you kidding? Google? Google is like one of the biggest ones. 


You know what's another big one? One of the biggest, Facebook, think of all the images. If I'm not mistaken, Facebook is like the biggest storage for images on the planet. Everybody's photos, everybody loads their photos on the image, you know how much storage that requires.


So at Facebook, Meta, the parent company that also owns WhatsApp and Instagram and all that, right? They've got a huge content distribution network, a huge meta cloud all over the world, because what if you're in China trying to access a photo from an account of a user that lives in New York, right? So guess what? That's being served to you from the metacloud from that location closest to you in China, or closest to you in wherever you are in the world. 


Google does this with all the Google files. Google Cloud, CDN Microsoft has its own Azure, right? So the Azure, there's other ones that I can't even pronounce, like Akamai. And there's other popular CDNs offering similar services with varying features and pricing options. 


I can tell you this for what you're getting with regards to hosting and bandwidth, Amazon, these other companies can barely hold a candle to what Amazon does and there are a lot of benefits to it, and price is definitely, definitely one of them. 


Now, if you are running a high, high, high traffic, type of website where you've got a lot of media that's being displayed, like if you've got a long video that plays on your front site and you're getting millions of hits per day, and that video has to load and be served, it's gonna start getting costly right from any kind of hosting service your own hosting. 


Trust me, even if your host has told you that you have unlimited hosting and unlimited bandwidth, there are limits to what a machine can do. And the moment that you start hitting those limits, they're gonna send you a message that says, Hey, we gotta expand your hosting. Hey, you need a dedicated server. Hey, you need another machine.


So don't believe the hype that you gotta unlimited anything with these hosting companies. The best thing to do is be on scalable storage, scalable hosting, and that's the kind of thing that you can get. That's the kind of benefit that you can get from putting your stuff on the cloud. 


Now, choosing the right one for you, well, that's gonna depend on a couple of things, right? So where exactly are you and where exactly do you wanna serve? Where you know, how do you wanna scale? How big are you gonna grow to that size? Where you have a million plus hits a day that you have to serve a million videos at the same time? 


I mean, think of it as a piece of media. Think about it, even if you considered it being like a movie theater where you're streaming the video, how many people can you sit in that movie theater? How many movie theaters do you need to have as your needs increase? Well, so do the prices on these things, those services that you're hiring to serve your media, right? 


You gotta consider geographical coverage. Scalability, can it grow as big as you, as you can? You know, is your hosting company that you're using, gonna be able to grow with you as your needs grow? And I see a lot of good people fall victim for these really cheap $1 a month hosting and stuff. 


You see these, these crazy ridiculous offers all the time, and they're usually by these little companies that could never handle big volume and that are not gonna help you scale. So you gotta be very careful. The other thing is integration with other services. Can you connect the other things to it?


You know, when you select the content distribution network, you need to be sure that you can use it with the applications that are required in your business, and that it's gonna be scaling with you, and that the price is right, because it can get costly. If, like I said, if you're one of those companies that has millions and millions of hits, every single day, serving that media to millions of people at the same time can get expensive. 


So, optimizing content delivery, using CDNs like Amazon CloudFront, together with your, you know, when, you know wherever you're actually hosting the information can really boost your website performance. So, CloudFront works directly with Amazon S3. That's the only way we've ever used it. But by improving the performance, there's also other benefits that come with that, right? What's one of the things that load time effects?


Well, your SEO ranking, when you've got these search engines crawling your site, their timing, how long is it taking to load this page? How long are these images taking? How long is this content taking to deploy? And if you're not loading fast, you're gonna get  a bad ranking so you're gonna be able to also increase your SEO, meaning you're gonna rank better in the search engine results. 


You're gonna increase your user engagement, right? Because now if you've got fast delivery, reliable content delivery worldwide, now people are gonna interact with it where they would've bounced, they would've just left. 


Otherwise, if your video is, trust me, nowadays, nobody's gonna sit around and wait for your video to buffer. We've become a CA culture that just is instant, instant reward. Like, we just want it right away. We want it now. And if it's taking more than a few seconds to load, then you know what? I don't have time for this. 


I'm gonna move on to the next. We are in a swipe economy. We just swipe up, swipe up, swipe up, and we look at the next thing. So if your video's taking too long, it doesn't look right, it doesn't sound right, boom, you've lost me. You've got two or three seconds and that's it. 


So by putting your content in the cloud, you're optimizing the performance of the site, you're optimizing the experience of the user, and all of these things are going to just basically create a better experience, not just for the user, but also for you. So I hope that you've learned quite a bit about the way the internet operates, about networking, about the cloud, and ultimately about content distribution networks. 


I urge you, if you're hosting a lot of files, a lot of media, a lot of video, if you're doing that, instead of using a free service for video like YouTube, which is basically gonna take ownership of your video, which could demonetize you and just take all your content offline at any moment.


Why not use or at least look into using something like Amazon S3 and CloudFront or any one of the other major CDNs out there to improve the user experience and as well as your bottom line for your company. I hope you've enjoyed this, and I look forward to seeing you in the next training.