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I heard Facebook uses Content Delivery Network(cdn) for loading things faster. Think if I want to load an image, this time it loads from CDN. And it doesn't show the actual address of CDN. A reverse proxy is also used for hiding a particular server address from clients. When it hits the server,it will redirect us? Is that for security? Does Facebook use reverse proxy?

Ben Druno
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Your understanding is only very partially correct.

In some ways, a reverse proxy may act like a CDN - in as much as it could (but does not always) pull data from an original source - but even here, a CDN would cache the content while a reverse proxy would not. A second important difference is that a CDN is distributed, ie there are parts of it in many places - a reverse proxy would not be distributed (although you could run multiple proxies to affect this). CDNs can also be preseeded with data to speed up lookups.

In neither the case of the reverse proxy or CDN is the IP of the proxy or CDN hidden - this is not possible. For clarity the actual server(s) IPs are hidden, and - particularly in the case of a reverse proxy are not neccessarily directly reachable over the Internet.

davidgo
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