Five Key Principles for Designing a Secure and Efficient Private Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Read full article here: https://www.axisnow.io/blog/building-a-private-cdn/?utm_source=nhimg

In today’s multi-cloud world, organizations increasingly seek control over their application security and delivery. Private CDNs have emerged as a powerful solution, offering enterprises greater privacy, reliability, and performance than public CDNs.

This guide explores the five foundational pillars behind AxisNow’s journey to build an enterprise-grade, self-hosted Private CDN, demonstrating how modern technologies once exclusive to global Internet giants are now accessible to teams of any size.

1. Edge Proxy: The Foundation of High Performance and Reliability

A CDN’s core is its reverse proxy, responsible for load balancing, caching, and accelerating traffic.

AxisNow’s first minimum viable product (MVP) centered on a distributed edge proxy, deployable across Linux environments. After evaluating popular stacks—Nginx, Traefik, Caddy, Pingora—we selected Nginx for its proven performance, reliability, and scalability.

This proxy core, named Aegis, forms the foundation of AxisNow’s edge infrastructure, ensuring consistent, high-speed content delivery across regions.

2. Extensible Functional Plugins: A Flexible Capability Framework

CDNs require more than just proxies; they must handle security, traffic management, access control, and availability.

AxisNow introduces a pluggable plugin framework enabling organizations to extend features modularly and on demand. Two architectural approaches were considered:

• Site/Domain-Centric Configuration: Traditional model used by Cloudflare and Akamai. Powerful but siloed, creating fragmented deployments.
• Policy/Plugin-Centric Traffic Control: AxisNow’s approach, unifying traffic management under a centralized policy layer, improving automation, consistency, and governance.

This design ensures scalable, manageable, and enterprise-ready Private CDN capabilities.

3. Global Traffic Management via DNS

Deploying edge proxies across multiple regions introduces the challenge of intelligent traffic routing.

AxisNow leverages DNS-based global traffic management, enabling:

• Geo-routing for proximity access
• Policy-driven dynamic address selection
• Health-aware automatic failover using monitoring data

This approach delivers Internet-scale traffic management for self-hosted CDNs without the expense of a dedicated BGP network, providing enterprises with reliable, low-latency delivery.

4. Performance and Availability Monitoring

A high-performing CDN requires continuous insight into latency, availability, and quality. AxisNow provides:

• Availability Monitoring: Active probes on edge nodes, IPs, and domains to detect real-time reachability issues.
• Latency & Quality Insights: Metrics to guide DNS and traffic routing for optimal performance.

AxisNow supports flexible deployment: monitoring nodes can be self-hosted or managed via our platform, ensuring full operational visibility.

5. Observability and Platform Foundation

Observability is critical for operational control, troubleshooting, and analytics. AxisNow’s monitoring suite provides:

• Entity Monitoring: Real-time edge node and plugin status
• Global Traffic Analytics: Traffic trends by region and resource
• Event & Activity Logs: Complete records of system and tenant actions
• Raw Log Export: Seamless integration with external data warehouses

Built on a multi-tenant, API-first SaaS framework, AxisNow ensures data isolation, scalability, and automation, enabling programmatic deployment and management.

Next Steps in AxisNow’s Private CDN Evolution

Following these five pillars, AxisNow plans to add:

• Origin Shield: Reduce origin server load and improve cache efficiency
• Smart Routing: AI-driven policies for globally optimized traffic delivery
• Origin Tunnels: Secure, zero-trust connectivity for internal and cloud-based applications

Together, these enhancements will allow organizations to operate high-performance, secure, and cost-effective Private CDNs, rivaling the capabilities of the largest Internet companies.

Conclusion

Private CDN technology is no longer limited to global tech giants. With modern infrastructure and AxisNow, even mid-sized enterprises and tech teams can build, manage, and optimize their own edge networks.

AxisNow leverages decades of CDN operational experience, including work with large-scale platforms such as TikTok, to bring enterprise-grade security, performance, and control to your own infrastructure—empowering organizations to deliver applications faster, safer, and more reliably than ever before.