Why CDN Certified exists

I've spent more than a decade with my hands 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 eventually sold that company, Warpcache. Across all of it I spoke to a lot of teams about how they deliver content, and one thing kept repeating.

Every single company I looked at was missing the basics, and every single one 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 pattern was so consistent that it stopped being a coincidence and started being the whole point.

Why the basics keep getting missed

It isn't that engineers don't care; it's that good CDN knowledge is hard to come by. Most of what's written lives in a single vendor's documentation, framed around that vendor's product and pricing; the rest is tribal knowledge, passed around in incident retros and the occasional conference hallway. There's very little that teaches the fundamentals on their own terms, vendor-agnostic, the way they actually transfer from one provider to the next.

So teams configure one CDN, get something that works, and move on. The cache hit ratio that could be twenty points higher, the Vary header quietly killing cacheability, the origin that's shielded in name only; all of it stays invisible until it shows up as a bill, a slow page, or a 3am incident.

Why this site exists

A few of us tried to fix this once before, with the CDN Alliance; the idea was a proper certification body for exactly this kind of knowledge. It got sidetracked, and in the end there simply wasn't enough of a base for it to stand on, so we wound it down about five years after we started. The problem it was meant to solve, though, never went away.

This site is my second run at it, on my own terms. It's where I'll gather the notes I've been keeping for years, share what I've learned the hard way, and show off the genuinely great setups and configs that deserve more attention. And it's where the course lives: CDN fundamentals at one end, advanced tricks at the other, all of it vendor-neutral and built around hands-on work rather than slideware.

What to expect

Short, practical posts; the kind of thing I wish I'd read before my first production incident. Real configs, honest trade-offs, and the occasional strong opinion on procurement. If you're new here, the best place to start is the free course overview; if you've been running CDNs for years, I'd wager there's still some low-hanging fruit on your stack. There usually is.