Push zone vs. pull zone: an Oslo software vendor ships big binaries

Push zone vs. pull zone: an Oslo software vendor ships big binaries
A desktop app vendor distributed 600MB installers via a pull zone — the CDN fetched from origin on first request per region. A new release meant the first user in every PoP triggered a cold 600MB origin pull, and that unlucky person in Oslo waited 22 seconds.
Launch-day origin egress spiked to 900GB as 30 regions each pulled fresh.
They moved release binaries to a push zone: upload once to CDN storage, pre-seeded everywhere, origin never touched on download.
First-byte time for the cold-region user dropped from 22s to 600ms. Origin egress on launch day fell to near zero.
Pull zones win for large, changing catalogs you can't pre-stage. Push zones win for a known set of heavy files you control and update on a schedule.
The number that mattered: cold download start from 22s to 600ms.