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Origin shield: the most boring feature that saves the most money
A shield tier sounds unglamorous, but for many customers it removes over half of the remaining origin traffic. A look at why.
Without a shield, a popular file that expires is fetched from your origin once per edge location: 38 requests for the same bytes. With a shield, the edges ask the shield, and the shield asks your origin once.
Request collapsing
The shield also merges concurrent misses. When a viral article expires and a thousand requests arrive in the same second, your origin sees exactly one.
Picking the shield location
We place the shield in the region closest to your origin. The dashboard shows the latency from each candidate so you can choose.