About
CDN Certified is a hands-on, vendor-agnostic certification course for engineers who want to actually understand Content Delivery Networks, not just configure one provider and hope for the best.
Why it exists
I've spent more than a decade in CDN and multi-CDN stacks; I built and maintained an internal multi-CDN application from 2013, went full time on a turnkey multi-CDN solution in 2015, and later sold that company, Warpcache. Along the way I spoke to a lot of teams about how they deliver content, and the same thing came up every time: everyone was missing the basics, and everyone had low-hanging fruit sitting unpicked on their delivery stack. No exceptions; not the small shops, not the household names, not even Formula 1 TV.
The reason is simple. Good CDN knowledge is scattered across vendor documentation and tribal knowledge, almost always framed around one provider's product; there's very little that teaches the fundamentals on their own terms, the way they actually transfer from one CDN to the next. We tried to change that once with the CDN Alliance, a first attempt at a certification body for exactly this; it got sidetracked and we eventually wound it down, but the gap it was meant to fill never closed. This course is the second run at it.
How the course works
It's built around real exercises: you configure caches, manipulate headers, debug edge behaviour, and reason about procurement trade-offs in Docker-based labs that mirror production setups. Every concept is taught provider-neutral, so the skills transfer to whichever CDN you use at work.
What you'll learn
- How CDNs work end to end; DNS, routing, edge caching, and protocols
- Cache configuration and header strategy for Nginx, Varnish, and CDN edges
- Debugging and auditing cache behaviour in the wild
- Performance optimisation against Core Web Vitals
- Business and procurement decisions for choosing and negotiating a CDN
Questions? Reach us at support@cdncertified.com.