Does Cloudinary serve images via a CDN?

Using Cloudinary, you can rest assured that your assets (images, videos, etc.) are delivered via CDN.

Cloudinary provides seamless integration with Akamai, Fastly, and CloudFlare as the CDN layer and includes modules that analyze the CDN flow, logs, etc. for remote resource refreshing, performing tuning, and usage reporting.

Because of that, some things work differently when using a CDN in front of Cloudinary as some of our functionality is based on direct integration with our CDNs and won't work if the majority of the traffic is cached by a different CDN or proxy.

Some of the features that are affected when using a CDN in front of Cloudinary:

1. Automatically delivering WebP, JP200, and JPEG-XR to supported browsers via the automatic format transformation. For images, this can save approximately 30% file size and bandwidth usage compared to serving JPEG to all users

2. Automatic invalidations for overwritten or deleted assets - with a CDN in front, invalidations would need to be taken care of on the external CDN layer, instead of having them sent automatically by our Media Library or in response to API calls.

3. Advanced SEO features - such as adding dynamic SEO-friendly text to the image URL, which is based on the configuration of our CDN layer.

4. Reporting and insights - these will be significantly less effective since we see only a small part of the traffic to the assets when another CDN is responding to much of the traffic (see https://cloudinary.com/console/reports for current account reports).

Therefore, it is preferred to have a CDN distribution layer owned and managed by Cloudinary. However, you are able to use your own CDN layer.

If this is something you are considering, please reach out to your dedicated CSM who would be able to supply more details and facilitate the request.