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Dynamic Content Delivery Network:What is DCDN?

Last Updated:Oct 16, 2023

Dynamic Content Delivery Network (DCDN) provides application acceleration, edge computing, and security protection for your applications.

  • Acceleration

    DCDN distributes content to users through over 3,200 globally distributed points of presence (POPs). Based on content distribution capabilities of Alibaba Cloud CDN, DCDN further integrates edge computing and security protection, providing end-to-end acceleration for dynamic and static content.

  • Edge computing

    You can write code and deploy it on DCDN POPs to process requests closer to your users. This significantly reduces processing latency and protects the origin server from being overloaded by requests. This reduces the number of concurrent requests on the origin server, reduces business fluctuations, and reduces the bandwidth cost.

  • Security protection

    DCDN provides edge security services on POPs. You can enable DDoS mitigation and Web Application Firewall (WAF) to identify and block attacks on POPs. This keeps risks away from data centers and protects assets such as websites, APIs, and applications deployed at the edge. In addition, DCDN provides features such as SSL certificates and access control to protect your data in a more efficient and secure manner.

Activate DCDN

Click here to activate DCDN

Architecture

The following architecture shows how DCDN works.

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Intelligent content acceleration

After you add domain names to DCDN, DCDN classifies the content requested by your users as static or dynamic content. Then, it automatically selects an acceleration policy based on the type of content to speed up the delivery of the content.

  • If the requested content is a static file, the request is most likely served directly from the POP nearest to users. If the requested content is not cached on the POP or has expired, the request is redirected to the origin server. After retrieving the content from the origin server, DCDN caches the content on its POPs and directly serves the content to the user.

  • If the requested content is a dynamic resource, DCDN uses its intelligent routing system to find the best route to the origin server, retrieves the requested content, and delivers it to the user. At the same time, persistent connections are maintained between POPs and the origin server and between individual POPs. This further reduces the time required to retrieve dynamic resources.

Intelligent and elastic edge computing services

You can deploy services or lightweight applications (referred to as routines) on POPs to implement edge processing, minimizing response latency. Client requests are automatically routed to the nearest POPs, triggering routines on receipt to handle the requests.

Edge security

DCDN POPs provide features such as edge WAF and DDoS mitigation, which serve to filter out malicious requests and redirect only normal and secure requests to the origin server. WAF can protect web servers against intrusions, secure important business data, and prevent server anomalies that are caused by attacks.

Scenarios

Gaming

DCDN is an ideal choice for web-based games and multiplayer online battle arenas. Aside from providing acceleration services such as route optimization and cache-based acceleration, DCDN can also provide security services.

E-commerce

E-commerce webpages contain a large number of images and text elements which can be accelerated by DCDN. Furthermore, DCDN's edge computing capabilities let you use the computing resources on POPs to render pages. This provides two major benefits: you no longer have to render the pages on your origin, and your users no longer have to render pages on their clients. The pages are rendered on and served from the POPs, improving response time and page loading time.

DCDN's global network coverage lets you deploy such services on POPs, shortening the distance between you and your users and reducing response times by over 50%.

Finance

The financial industry has strict requirements on the availability and security of their networks. For example, transactions are dynamic and interactive processes, and are vulnerable to attacks if they are performed over unsecured cross-network connections. Therefore, we recommend that you use the edge WAF and DDoS mitigation features provided by DCDN in financial scenarios to safeguard every transaction.

Learn more

Billing

You are charged for the basic services and value-added services of DCDN. Overview

Management tools

  • DCDN console. For more information, see Features.

  • DCDN API operations. For more information, see API Reference.

Best practices

Use Cases