What a CDN does:
- Edge caching — static assets served from the closest edge location, not your origin
- DDoS protection — absorbs attack traffic at the edge
- TLS termination — handles HTTPS so origin can be plain HTTP (internal)
- WAF — web application firewall, blocks malicious patterns
- Rate limiting — per-IP request limits
Cloudflare specifically also offers:
- Workers (edge compute)
- R2 (S3-compatible object storage)
- Argo (smart routing for non-cacheable traffic)
- Cache rules and page rules