A content delivery network (CDN) is a network of servers that deliver web content to users based on their geographic location. A CDN can improve the performance, reliability, and security of a web application by caching content closer to the users and reducing the load on the origin server.
One of the security advantages of using a CDN is that it can provide resiliency against distributed denial-of- service (DDoS) attacks, which are attempts to overwhelm a web server with a large number of requests from multiple sources. A CDN can mitigate DDoS attacks by:
Distributing the traffic across multiple servers and locations, making it harder for attackers to target a single point of failure Filtering out malicious requests before they reach the origin server, using techniques such as rate limiting, IP blocking, and challenge-response mechanisms Absorbing the attack traffic with greater bandwidth and resources than the origin server, reducing the impact on the web application's availability and performance