Introduction
ZeroBuffer is a content delivery platform built around three pieces: object storage at the edge, a CDN that serves it, and a separate video pipeline that handles encoding and streaming. This page explains which one you want.
Edge Storage
A storage zone is an object store. You upload files to it over FTP, the native Storage API, or any S3-compatible SDK, and they are replicated to the regions you choose. Every storage zone is created with a pull zone in front of it, so the files it holds are served from a CDN hostname without any extra wiring.
Use Edge Storage for anything you want to store and serve as a file: images, downloads, game patches, build artifacts, HLS segments you produced yourself. See Edge Storage to get started, or the S3-compatible API to connect existing S3 tooling.
Video CDN
Video CDN is a separate product with its own library, not a view over a storage zone. You hand it a source video and it takes over from there — transcoding into an adaptive bitrate ladder, generating thumbnails, producing HLS manifests, and serving them through a player-ready URL.
See Video CDN for how content gets in and what comes out.
Which one do I want?
The dividing line is whether you want the file served back as you uploaded it, or processed first.
| If you want to… | Use |
|---|---|
| Serve files exactly as uploaded | Edge Storage |
| Connect an existing S3 SDK or tool | Edge Storage (S3 API) |
| Transcode video into an ABR ladder and stream it | Video CDN |
| Host HLS renditions you already encoded yourself | Edge Storage |
A note on how the two connect
They are independent products, and this is the part that most often surprises people: Video CDN does not mount a storage zone as its origin. Putting an MP4 into a storage zone does not make it appear in your video library. Video CDN ingests content in its own right, either by direct upload or by fetching a URL you give it — and that URL can point at a file in your storage zone, which is the usual way to move something from one to the other.
If what you want is a CDN in front of your own origin server rather than in front of storage, that is a pull zone, and it is configured separately from both.