Stack category
European CDN & Edge Providers
A content delivery network (CDN) caches your site's static assets on edge servers close to your visitors, cutting latency and absorbing traffic spikes and DDoS attacks.
Why this layer matters for sovereignty
Your CDN terminates every visitor's TLS connection — it can see and log IPs, URLs, and payloads. Under the US CLOUD Act, providers subject to US jurisdiction can be compelled to hand over that data.
CDN logs are personal data under the GDPR: a European provider keeps your visitors' data inside the EEA and under EU legal order only.
Edge caching is also a resilience layer: origin outages and L7 attacks are absorbed at the edge instead of taking your site down.
What to look for
PoP coverage in the regions your visitors actually come from — European networks are well peered among themselves.
Full request/response logging controls: the ability to disable or shorten log retention is a GDPR requirement, not a nice-to-have.
Anycast or DNS-based DDoS protection and a WAF, so you don't need a separate security provider.
Transparent pricing per bandwidth or per request — CDNs are famously prone to surprise bills.
European & open-source edge & cdn providers
Curated as part of the European Stack Builder. Badges reflect the organization's origin — EU, EEA, EFTA, and UK count as European.
Frequently asked questions
What is a CDN?
A CDN (content delivery network) is a globally distributed network of proxy servers that caches static content — images, CSS, JavaScript, video — close to the visitor. Requests are served from the nearest edge server instead of your origin, which reduces latency and offloads traffic from your own infrastructure.
Why use a European CDN instead of Cloudflare or Akamai?
A CDN sees all of your traffic: visitor IPs, requested URLs, and TLS connections. A European provider processes that data inside the EU/EEA under the GDPR, outside the reach of the US CLOUD Act. For public-sector, healthcare, or compliance-sensitive workloads, that jurisdiction is often a hard requirement.
Which layer of the stack does the CDN occupy?
The CDN is usually the outermost layer of your stack: DNS points at it, it terminates TLS for visitors, and it forwards cache misses to your reverse proxy or application server behind it.
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