Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA)
Dynamic Site Acceleration, often shortened to DSA, is a set of techniques that CDNs use to optimize delivery of content that cannot be cached. Static files like images or scripts are easy to serve from edge servers, but dynamic pages, personalized dashboards, or API responses must still be fetched from the origin. DSA focuses on speeding up this unavoidable leg of the journey. Origins of DSA The concept appeared in the mid-2000s when early CDNs like Akamai began to bundle “application acceleration” products alongside their traditional caching services. Enterprises needed faster access to dynamic applications such as e-commerce checkouts or financial dashboards, which could not simply be cached at the edge. Providers promoted DSA as a premium add-on, often sold on top of a core CDN contract. Over time, most large vendors—Akamai, Limelight, and later Cloudflare and Fastly—added similar capabilities, though often under different names. ...