System Design

CDN Edge Caching vs Origin Shield

System Design diagram · made in Skemio

Architecture diagram illustrating clients querying regional edge PoPs, which route cache misses to a central Origin Shield before querying the core application server.
Architecture diagram illustrating clients querying regional edge PoPs, which route cache misses to a central Origin Shield before querying the core application server.
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What it shows

  • Regional PoPs collapse global user traffic into local cache hits
  • Origin shield merges regional misses, preventing origin stampedes
  • Shielding cuts origin bandwidth and connection pools by up to 90%

The takeaway

An origin shield turns thousands of regional cache misses into a single serialized upstream fetch.

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