CDNs are definitely useful still, maybe more so as more and more of the world has access to the Internet. Ultimately all of everything we do online is transmitt

CDNs are definitely useful still, maybe more so as more and more of the world has access to the Internet. Ultimately all of everything we do online is transmitted as 1s and 0s over some sort of wire, and the best we can do at moving those 1s and 0s is the speed of light. Since distance is a factor and light only moves so fast, it is better to have your content closer to your users than not to get around the speed of light problem. Likewise, while servers can handle a lot of load these days, they can't handle infinite load, and it's nice to spread that work out amongst many machines - many hands make light work. A CDN solves both of these problems by holding and serving copies of your content around the world, near your consumers and off your server. If you hosted on a server in the US but served to a customer in Europe, you can save having to go across an ocean by using a CDN. As a front end developer, the static bits of a modern website can be almost entirely hosted in a CDN, leaving only much smaller JSON data that has to go back to origin - but there again, only sometimes if you design your content for caching. You can also do clever things like keep bad guys out of your network by letting the CDN take the brunt of the load, and sometimes tossing it altogether so it never nears your origin.