A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centers designed to provide high availability and performance. For a static website accessed globally, a CDN caches the site's content (e.g., HTML, CSS, images) at edge locations around the world. When a user requests the website, the content is served from the nearest edge location, which significantly reduces the physical distance the data must travel. This minimization of distance is the most effective way to reduce network latency for end-users.

A. VPC: A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) provides a logically isolated network environment within a public cloud. Its primary purpose is security and network segmentation, not global performance optimization or latency reduction.

B. Application load balancer: An Application Load Balancer (ALB) distributes traffic across multiple targets (like virtual machines) within a specific region to enhance availability and scalability, but it does not distribute content globally to reduce latency.

D. API gateway: An API gateway acts as a reverse proxy to manage, secure, and route API requests to backend services. It is not designed for caching and delivering static website content to reduce latency.

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Documentation. (2023). What Is Amazon CloudFront? Amazon Web Services

Inc. Retrieved from https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/Introduction.html. In the "How CloudFront delivers content" section

it states

"When a user requests content that you're serving with CloudFront

the request is routed to the edge location that provides the lowest latency (time delay)

so that content is delivered with the best possible performance."

2. Microsoft Azure Documentation. (2023). What is a content delivery network (CDN) on Azure? Microsoft. Retrieved from https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cdn/cdn-overview. The overview section states

"A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users. CDNs store cached content on edge servers in point-of-presence (POP) locations that are close to end users

to minimize latency."

3. Google Cloud Documentation. (2023). Cloud CDN overview. Google. Retrieved from https://cloud.google.com/cdn/docs/overview. The document explains

"Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network) uses Google's global edge network to bring content closer to your users. Bringing content closer to your users accelerates response times for your websites and applications."

4. Kurose

J. F.

& Ross

K. W. (2021). Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (8th ed.). Pearson. In Chapter 2

Section 2.6

"Content Distribution Networks

" the text details how CDNs place servers in multiple geographically distributed locations to serve content to users from the closest edge server

thereby reducing latency and improving user experience.