# Caching vs CDN

### Cache(ElastiCache)

Again caching is storing data that are frequently accessed into RAM so that they can be retrieved more quickly than going through a disk / a database query which takes significantly more time on CPU scale.

### CDN

Content delivery network is a network of proxy servers that are placed in different geographical locations all around the world. **The goal is that rather than having the user say in California make a request to a server that is in New York to request content, you place those website contents in CDN so that they can be retrieved quicker by making a request to the CDN server closer to the user.**

[![image.png](https://wiki.tamarinne.me/uploads/images/gallery/2023-02/scaled-1680-/WRkimage.png)](https://wiki.tamarine.me/uploads/images/gallery/2023-02/WRkimage.png)

##### Cache and CDN

They both share the purpose of retrieving content quicker for the user.