1 component that will save your app architecture

A few weeks ago, I saw this post on Reddit:

While it made me laugh, it also reminded me of an experiment I ran in Zero to Architect Playbook.

The experiment that proves how vital CDN is for building scalable .NET applications.

(CDN is a global network of servers where you can store your static files, so that clients can retrieve them much faster.)

Imagine this scenario…
Your storage account is in New Zealand.
But you have some users from Europe. And they are requesting images from that New Zealand blob container.

That means every request must travel:
Europe → Middle East → Asia → Oceania → New Zealand
…and all the way back.

Even if your storage account is blazing fast, physics still wins.

This is why your frontend feels “slow” even if your backend is optimized.

In the experiment I did, I uploaded a tiny file, just a 1 KB test.txt file, to a Storage Account in New Zealand.

Then I hit that file from Europe using Bombardier to simulate real traffic.

Here are the results when requesting the file directly from the distant storage account:

Reqs/sec:     170
Latency:      ~293ms
Throughput:   ~227 KB/s
Total requests inside 30 seconds: 5140

But when you create a CDN and set the source for it to be the same storage account, the CDN caches the file in a European CDN server. So the performance completely changes:

Reqs/sec:     1836
Latency:      ~27ms
Throughput:   ~2.38 MB/s
Total requests inside 30 seconds: 55114

That’s a 10x increase in the number of processed requests and a 10x decrease in latency.

The only difference is that the file was served from a server close to the user instead of the other side of the world.

And that’s the real power of a CDN.

It can improve the scalability of your app. Since the CDN handles the bulk of incoming requests, that means your storage account is not getting hammered with the traffic.

As your user base grows across regions, you can scale to thousands of concurrent users without upgrading or scaling out your origin infrastructure.

If you would like to architect and build easily scalable and high-performance .NET apps from scratch, even if you get vague project requirements…

Use the Zero to Architect Playbook training.

As Raj, a .NET developer, mentioned:

“It provides a pathway for you to become, first, a senior developer and, then finally, an architect.”

Details here: https://zerotoarchitect.net/