Origin shield: CDN and additional protection

In this hyperconnected world, in which devices multiply exponentially, overloads are a reality. This is why it’s advisable to look for better origin protection, especially in cases in which content delivery is a key element of the business. This protection is normally referred to as Origin Shield, and at Transparent we named it Mid Tier. 

With the origin shield, the CDN placed between the origin and the end-users, will also have an integrated protection that complements its role as a request filter, and a protective barrier against DDoS attacks. 

In times of need the origin shield is a lifeline, and in everyday situations, it helps reduce traffic to the server effortlessly. 

Origin shield or cache layer 2

An origin shield is an additional caching layer that allows requests to be offloaded from the backend, while simplifying security management at the origin. 

Our Mid Tier is located between the edge servers and the origin, and it acts as a funnel. It limits the number of requests reaching our clients’ origin servers.

That way, having a reduced number of edge servers that “communicate” with the origin, it’s much easier to establish and maintain IP-filtering policies and create white lists with only a few IPs instead of many. 

To manage less requests at the origin allows to preserve its availability in moments of traffic spikes, while reducing the cost of data transferring or image transformation, for example. 

Depending on the client’s needs and characteristics, this shield can be a node with a location assigned by us or, in dedicated mode, a node placed where the client specifies.

Mid Tier: protection against downtime and performance boost 

As mentioned above, having this type of shield is a good strategy both in times of need and in daily operations regarding delivery content. 

In the first case, for instance, we are talking about a service interruption scenario with long periods of downtime, such as those in 2021 and 2022 by major U.S. CDNs. Keep in mind that no CDN is immune to something like this. In these crisis situations, an origin shield protects you against downtime by taking over from the CDN. If the CDN fails, the client’s domains can be directed to the origin shield, which can then serve the content.

In the second case (daily operations), an example of how the shield helps is when one of the CDN edge nodes receives a request from a user and cannot satisfy it from the cache. In this case, instead of going to the client’s origin looking for the content, it goes to the shield. This offloads the origin and speeds up the response to a cache miss. Focusing on the big picture, this provides an added boost to performance and effectiveness in content delivery.

The origin shield: essential in multi-CDN strategies

All of this aside, the Mid Tier is a valuable tool in multi-CDN strategies. Multi-CDN strategies involve configurations with two or more CDNs, with each provider handling a portion of the requests.

These strategies improve performance and reliability in content delivery, but they can overload the origin. This is because with multiple CDNs, the origin may receive duplicate requests for the same content from different CDNs, negatively impacting its availability and potentially causing additional operational costs. The way to prevent this is through our origin shield.