Modern digital platforms—from video streaming (YouTube, Netflix) and social media to cloud drives (Google Drive, Dropbox) and software distribution (Docker registries, npm)—manage petabytes or exabytes of unstructured binary data (videos, images, audio, binaries, backups).
Relational and document databases break down when storing large binary objects (BLOBs) directly in tables, suffering from B-Tree page fragmentation, massive WAL bloat, and memory cache pollution. Production architectures separate metadata (stored in high-speed relational or NoSQL databases) from raw binary payload data (stored in distributed Object Stores and distributed via global Content Delivery Networks).
This module deconstructs modern object storage and content distribution systems: Content-Addressable Storage (CAS), S3 multipart upload coordination, rolling-hash deduplication, global CDN Anycast routing, origin shields, and resilient edge caching mechanics.