The Five Pillars of Building a Private CDN
In today’s multi-cloud era, more and more organizations are seeking to take control of their own application security and delivery. Building a Private CDN has emerged as a growing trend.
This article shares the five key capability pillars behind AxisNow’s journey to create an enterprise-grade Private CDN platform—how we democratize technologies once exclusive to large Internet companies, and how we are progressively building each piece.
1. Starting from the Edge Proxy: The Foundation of High Performance and Reliability (2025 Q1)
At its core, a CDN is essentially a reverse proxy. Over the past decade, a rich ecosystem of reverse-proxy-based technologies has emerged—covering load balancing, API gateways, security protection, and transmission acceleration.
AxisNow’s product journey also begins here.
Our first minimum viable product (MVP) is a distributed edge proxy deployable in Linux environments.
When selecting the underlying tech stack, we evaluated performance, reliability, scalability, and security comprehensively. After comparing Nginx, Traefik, Caddy, and Pingora, we chose the Nginx stack—proven, low-risk, and highly iterative.
We named this proxy core Aegis, representing the foundation of our edge infrastructure.
2. Extensible Functional Plugins: Building a Flexible Capability Framework (2025 Q2)
A CDN is a broad system encompassing security, performance, access control, availability, and connectivity.
The most critical design challenge is how to extend these capabilities on top of the proxy layer in a modular, maintainable way.
AxisNow’s focus is clear: we serve websites, applications, and APIs (excluding live streaming). Around these targets, we’ve built a pluggable feature framework that can be combined on demand.
We explored two technical architectures:
- Site/Domain-Centric Configuration
- This is the traditional model used by Cloudflare or Akamai, where each product line is built independently. While powerful in isolation, it creates silos—leading to complex deployment and fragmented data once cross-domain collaboration is needed.
- Even Cloudflare is striving to break free from this “product-island” architecture.
- Policy/Plugin-Centric Traffic Control
- AxisNow abstracts traffic control into a unified policy layer, enabling consistent processing regardless of which site or application the traffic comes from.
- This design greatly improves management efficiency and automation but introduces a new UX challenge: helping users with only a few domains intuitively understand these policy relationships. We continue refining the visualization and interaction experience for this.
3. Global Traffic Management via DNS: Bringing Internet-Scale Routing to Private Networks (2025 Q3)
Once edge proxies are deployed across multiple regions, a central challenge emerges: how to intelligently route global traffic.
For most organizations, building a dedicated BGP network is prohibitively expensive, so DNS-based routing becomes the key mechanism.
In the past, teams had to build their own authoritative DNS systems. Today, the maturity of cloud infrastructure allows us to achieve this at a higher abstraction level.
AxisNow adopts a “third-party DNS integration and orchestration” model through modular plugins, enabling:
- Geo-based routing for proximity access,
- Policy-driven dynamic address selection, and
- Health-aware automatic failover linked to monitoring data.
This design draws on our experience building secure CDNs and large-scale distribution systems (e.g., TikTok-grade infrastructures), allowing enterprises to achieve Internet-class traffic management even in self-hosted environments.
4. Performance and Availability Monitoring: Giving the System Self-Awareness (2025 Q3)
No CDN is complete without a solid monitoring system. AxisNow’s monitoring focuses on two layers:
- Availability Monitoring – Active probes on edge nodes, IPs, and domains to assess real-time reachability.
- Latency & Quality Insights – Collecting connection delay and request-quality data to guide DNS in making better routing decisions.
Following our “loosely coupled design” philosophy, users can either self-host their monitoring nodes or use AxisNow’s managed monitoring service—depending on their operational needs.
5. Observability and Platform Foundation: The Operational Core of a Private CDN (2025 Q1)
Operating a Private CDN means full ownership and control—which requires strong observability.
AxisNow provides a complete monitoring and analytics suite to help technical teams understand system health, trace issues, and analyze traffic trends:
- Entity Monitoring – Real-time status of edge nodes, resources, and plugins.
- Global Traffic Analytics – Traffic distribution by resource or edge region.
- Event & Activity Logs – Comprehensive records of tenant actions and system events.
- Raw Log Export – Synchronization with external data warehouses for in-depth analysis.
At the platform level, AxisNow is built on a multi-tenant, API-first SaaS framework, ensuring data isolation, flexible scalability, and automation.
The API-first approach allows seamless integration into your existing stack, enabling programmatic deployment and maintenance.
Next Steps
After establishing these five foundational pillars, our next phase will focus on:
- Origin Shield – Reducing origin load and improving cache hit rates.
- Smart Routing – Using real-time monitoring and AI-driven policies to achieve global optimal routing.
- Origin Tunnels – Seamless, zero-trust connectivity between your home, cloud, or private networks to securely expose internal applications.
Together, these capabilities will further strengthen AxisNow’s private edge platform, empowering organizations to build secure, high-performance application delivery networks with maximum control and minimal cost.
Conclusion
Private CDN technology is no longer exclusive to large Internet companies.
With today’s mature infrastructure ecosystem, even mid-sized enterprises and tech enthusiasts can build, operate, and optimize their own edge networks step by step.
AxisNow team has rich knowledge and practical experience in CDN operations for large-scale internet services. Our previous company once provided services for TikTok's CDN network. We makes these once-elite technologies accessible to everyone, offering a new way to achieve secure application delivery on your own terms.