System Design: Serving Static Assets at Scale

Explain how you would architect a system to serve static assets (images, JS bundles, media) to users worldwide with low latency.

Technical Reference & Key Concepts

The Challenge: Global Static Asset Delivery

Your company ships a web app whose static assets (images, JS/CSS bundles, videos) must load quickly for users on every continent. Currently everything is served from a single origin server in one region.

Core questions to address:

  1. What components would you add between the user and the origin, and what problem does each solve?
  2. How does cache invalidation work when you ship a new version of a bundle?
  3. What happens when a CDN edge is cold or the origin goes down?