In Feburary 2016 15,
A content delivery network is simply a way to describe a method for getting information to you over the Internet. Without a CDN, when someone requests information from you, a central server sends the information out over the Internet. If the client is geographically located in a faraway place, it can take quite some time for the information to flow through all the required Internet servers before it reaches its destination. With a CDN, instead of a single central server your information is duplicated on a number of servers located around the world. When someone requests information from you, the user is automatically directed to the server that's physically closest to him.
CDN Benefits
The largest benefit of a CDN is the reduction in time that it takes to deliver information to you. While generally it only takes a extra few hundred milliseconds to send data across the world, if your user is loading a Web page with a number of files, all those extra hundreds of milliseconds add up to a fairly long wait time. CDNs also help reduce traffic on your main servers, allowing many more people to download your information at once without causing a traffic bottleneck.
Flickr
On its face, Flickr is not a CDN. Flickr is simply a website that allows you to store, display and access image files. While many websites do use Flickr for content delivery, for instance, by having a Web page link to images stored on Flickr, the service isn't intended to be a method for reducing content access speeds. However, if your single server is getting bombarded with requests and is spending most of its time uploading images to users, using Flickr to store those images instead of your server is one option that will give you some relief similar to a CDN-based solution.
Does Flickr Use a CDN?
Since Flickr serves users around the world, you may automatically assume that it uses a CDN, but that's not necessarily true. Traceroutes -- which measure the paths and delays of packets as they travel across a network -- to the same page from around the world show that Flickr uses a CDN for most of the static imagery on the site, like the logos and company information, but not for the images. This makes sense, as duplicating a database the size of Flickr's several times would result in an enormous use of data, most of which would be useless as these images are rarely accessed from multiple physical locations.
In Feburary 2016 15,
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