On April 13, 2019, 17.4 million users watched the newly released episode of Games of Thrones. The Trump vs. Clinton debate was streamed to 2 million simultaneous users over the Internet. Serving content at such a huge scale requires advanced engineering solutions, to ensure scalability and security.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) solve this challenge. Being conceived during a student competition on algorithms at MIT, they are now the pillars of the Internet, although the common man does not even know they exist.
In this talk I will describe the inner mechanics of CDNs, with a particular focus on redirection, authentication, caching and video workflow.