What Are CDNs, and What Do They Have To Do With the Cloud?

Content material supply networks (CDNs) are a geographically distributed community of servers (caches) that work collectively to ship content material by shifting it nearer to the end-users.

At TeleGeography, we observe the cache places (greater than 2,300) by metropolis (greater than 500) of the most important CDN corporations (over 20).

Akamai is the biggest CDN firm by variety of websites, with near 350. Cloudflare is second with slightly below 300, and CDNetworks is a distant third with slightly below 200 cluster websites.

Geographically, Asia has the very best variety of cache websites (over 700), adopted by Europe with over 500 places, and the U.S. and Canada with over 450.

Content material Supply Community PoP Map

Notes: Notes: Information as of Q1 2025. Supply: © 2025 TeleGeography

Are content material supply networks (CDNs) cloud networks?

Not essentially, however many of the high cloud suppliers, corresponding to AWS, Google, and Microsoft, supply CDN providers on their cloud networks.

Are CDN suppliers cloud suppliers?

Today, the traces are blurring. CDN suppliers are providing cloud providers and have been including conventional cloud providers like compute, storage or networking to the product lists.

For instance, Akamai—the dominant participant and paragon of a CDN supplier and the bellwether for the CDN trade—started providing cloud providers in earnest after its acquisition of cloud computing firm Linode in 2022.

Why begin promoting cloud providers?

The CDN trade has been troubled not too long ago. Rising capex, declining margins, and stiff competitors have affected some main suppliers over the previous two years—Stackpath shut down, Edgio declared chapter, and Lumen exited the CDN market.

Akamai nonetheless dominates the CDN market however has shifted its focus to providing new providers like safety and now infrastructure as a service as CDN earnings have dipped.

This evaluation was pulled from our newly up to date Cloud and WAN Analysis Service. Obtain the free govt abstract to maintain studying.