> What I mean by this is a CDN consists of nodes that are horizontally replicable and don't really talk to each other, and thus are easy to run even at scale.
They do though! They mostly try to avoid it since hitting the network to serve any kind of latency would unacceptably increase latency, but you wildly underestimated the amount of complexity there is to running a CDN.
I probably underestimated the complexity and I didn't mean to knock on CDNs - I just wanted to say that not all distributed systems have equal complexity, and some require essentially almost serializable transactions, while others are fine with small channels of eventual consistency
They do though! They mostly try to avoid it since hitting the network to serve any kind of latency would unacceptably increase latency, but you wildly underestimated the amount of complexity there is to running a CDN.