Delivery edge node

What the node actually does

Requests arrive with a signed path. The node validates the signature, checks the two cache tiers, and either serves the segment or fetches it from the origin shield before storing it. Nothing else about the request is interpreted — there is no per-viewer logic and no session state on this host.

• Byte-range requests are served from the tier that holds the object; partial hits are stitched rather than refetched whole.
• Objects are keyed by path and by the normalised subset of query parameters that affect the bytes. Everything else in the query string is ignored for cache purposes.
• A signature that has expired produces 403 without touching the cache, so an expired link costs nothing beyond the TLS handshake.
• The node refuses to be an open proxy: an unsigned path is a 403, and a path outside the configured prefixes is a 404.

Health reporting

Health is a single JSON document, produced by the same code path the load balancer polls. Two flags matter to a caller: serving, which drops to false during a drain, and refilling, which indicates the node is warming after a restart and will have a lower hit ratio for a while.

# the balancer polls exactly this
$ curl -s https://vkvideo.abrdns.com/rest/edge/health
{
  "serving": true,
  "refilling": false,
  "release": "2026.06.1",
  "tier": "eu-west",
  "cache": { "hit_ratio_5m": 0.94, "objects": 418223 }
}

See the health page for the field list and for what each state means operationally.

What is not here

Operator contact

Delivery problems that involve this node — stalls, truncated segments, unexpected 403 responses on links you believe are valid — should be reported with the full request URL, the response headers you received, and a timestamp in UTC. Without the response headers there is no way to tell which tier answered.

Address and disclosure policy are published in security.txt. Terms covering use of the delivered content are in the terms page.