Final answer:
The Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is used to cache and deliver web content to users around the world with reduced latency, thereby enhancing user experience and allowing for better web performance and application scalability.
Step-by-step explanation:
The Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is designed to deliver high-bandwidth content to users across the globe with reduced latency. The CDN stores cached content on edge servers in point-of-presence (POP) locations that are closer to end-users, compared to where the website's originating server might be located. By doing so, it ensures a faster and more reliable delivery of content such as HTML pages, javascript files, stylesheets, images, and videos.
When a user requests a piece of content, the Azure CDN works to redirect the request from the origin server to the server closest to the user that has the cached content. If the edge server does not have the content, it will fetch it from the origin server and then cache it for subsequent requests. This not only speeds up the loading time for the user but also reduces load on the origin server, which can be particularly beneficial during times of high traffic.
Using the Azure CDN can result in enhanced user experience, as the speed of content delivery is a critical component of web performance. Moreover, it can aid in scaling applications by offloading the traffic to a distributed network of servers, thereby improving reliability and reducing bandwidth costs.