Origins and origin groups

CDN servers retrieve the content requested by clients from origins.

As origins, you can use:

• A server with a domain name linked to it. For example, if the server's domain name is files.example.com, to get the /static/common.css file, CDN servers will try to access files.example.com/static/common.css on the server.
• A bucket from Yandex Object Storage, for example, configured as a static site hosting.
• L7 network load balancer from Yandex Application Load Balancer. CDN servers will access the load balancer at one of its IP addresses that must be selected in the origin settings.

An origin must respond to the CDN server's request within 5 seconds. If no response was received during this time, the CDN server responds to the client with the 504 Gateway Timeout HTTP status code.

When creating a resource, an origin or an origin group is specified for it. After creating a resource, in the resource settings, you can replace an origin with another origin or a resource group with another resource group.

To reduce the load of CDN servers on origins, you can enable origin shielding for a resource.

Origin groups

To distribute the load between origins hosting the same content, you can combine them into an origin group.

Origins in the group can be active or backup. Requests from CDN servers are distributed among active origins in a circular manner.

For example, if an origin group includes two active origins, the first content request will be sent to the first origin, the second request ‒ to the second origin, the third request ‒ to the first origin again, and so on.

If the active origin responded to the CDN server with HTTP status code 5xx, the request is sent to one of the backup origins. If there are no backup origins in the origin group or the response includes code 5xx again, the CDN server sends the response with code 5xx to the client.

See also

• Instructions for operations with origins.