Infrastructure
Anycast
Anycast is a network addressing method in which a single IP address is announced from many locations and routers deliver each packet to the topologically nearest instance. It underpins DNS root servers, CDNs, and modern DDoS-resistant services.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a geographically distributed system of proxy servers that caches web content close to end users to cut latency, offload origin infrastructure, and absorb traffic spikes. Pioneered by Akamai in 1998 as an MIT spin-out, modern CDNs operated by firms like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, and Amazon CloudFront now also terminate TLS, mitigate DDoS attacks, and run code at the edge.
Hyperscale Data Center
A hyperscale facility is the building-scale unit of cloud and AI infrastructure: hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts of IT load on a single campus, owned or anchored by a handful of cloud and platform companies.
Edge Computing
Edge computing is a distributed paradigm that moves computation and data storage closer to where data is generated or consumed, reducing latency and backbone bandwidth versus centralized cloud processing. Modern uses range from IoT and autonomous vehicles to CDN-hosted serverless functions.
DDoS Mitigation
DDoS mitigation is the practice of detecting and absorbing distributed denial-of-service traffic before it overwhelms the target. Modern defenses combine scrubbing centers, anycast absorption by CDNs, rate limiting, and protocol-level filters against volumetric, protocol, and application-layer attacks.
Ireland's Data Center Grid Constraint
By 2023 data centers consumed more than a fifth of Ireland's metered electricity — more than all rural households combined — leading to a four-year freeze on new Dublin-area grid connections.
Northern Virginia Data Center Alley
The Ashburn-centred cluster in Loudoun and Prince William counties is the largest concentration of data center capacity on Earth, and the proximate reason that a single U.S. state utility now plans tens of billions of dollars of transmission build-out.