Rackspace CDN Overview

Rackspace CDN is
a content delivery network (CDN) service that you can use to CDN-enable your website. It offers features such as pulling content from your website's origin servers, rules for caching, access restrictions, and purging content from the
CDN's edge nodes.

Rackspace CDN is designed to improve the performance of publicly distributed assets. Assets can be anything from website content, to web application components, to media like videos, ads, and interactive experiences. CDNs decrease the load time of these assets by caching them on edge nodes, which are also called edge servers or point of presence (PoP) servers. Edge nodes are distributed around the globe and they cache content and serve it directly to
your customers, thus reducing transit time to a customer's location.

With simple provisioning via the Rackspace Cloud Control Panel or API, Rackspace customers can CDN-enable their websites and applications in seconds, no matter where the content is stored. They can also manage their CDN-enabled domains and the origins and assets associated with those domains.

Rackspace CDN works with all Rackspace origins like Cloud Servers, Cloud Load Balancers, Cloud Files, Dedicated servers, and any other resources with a public interface.

The Rackspace CDN architecture includes the following components:

  • Use of the Akamai Technologies content delivery network, which is one of the world's largest distributed computing platforms, with over 230 edge nodes around the world
  • The ability to cache publicly accessible resources hosted on a Cloud Servers instance, or in a public Cloud Files container
  • Cloud Control Panel integration
  • A RESTful API
  • A single global endpoint to access the API

The following articles provide more general information about Rackspace CDN:

Additional resources