Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes content (e.g. static data such as HTML, PNG images, videos, applications, etc) from an origin server to a location closer to the user’s region in order to reduce latency and bandwidth costs. It may work both on a passive cache-aside basis but also as an active on-push system.
Akamai: Akami introduced a CDN offering to the marketplace years before cloud computing (e.g. AWS) was a reality. Today it suffers from extreme competition from vendors that also are strong in their security offering like Cloudflare as well as from the convenience of using CDN services native to a given cloud such as Amazon CloudFront.
Cloufflare CDN: Cloudflare is one of the most rapidly growing CDN vendors with backing from Microsoft, Google & IBM. Although cloudflare is primarily an internet security service (e.g. prevention from DDoS attacks), integrating security and caching is convenient since it reduces the number of roundtrips to the origin servers.
Amazon CloudFront: Amazon CloudFront is the default option for AWS-based services since it can be instrumented programatically. However, in a multi-cloud or public/on-premise scenario, it may be a less attractive option.