Patent ID: 8612550

Claim:
A network comprising: a load balancer, the load balancer being configured for receiving and routing content requests received from one or more clients to one or more edge routing servers based at least in part on a health status associated with each of the edge routing servers, the load balancer being unaware of where any content corresponding to the content requests resides; a plurality of edge routing servers including the one or more edge routing servers, each of the plurality of edge routing servers being configured for routing content requests according to a predictive routing protocol which predicts where cached content corresponding to the content requests resides, but wherein none of the plurality of edge routing servers are configured for independently caching the content corresponding to the content requests; a plurality of edge caching servers, each of the plurality of edge caching servers caching different content corresponding to the content requests, such that each of the plurality of edge caching servers caches mutually exclusive sets of the cached content, wherein each of at least some of the plurality of edge routing servers receive a plurality of content requests from at least some of a plurality of client computing systems via the load balancer, wherein each of the multiple edge routing servers is configured to do the following when receiving a content request: an act of identifying which of the plurality of edge caching servers is correlated to the requested content based at least in part on the predictive routing protocol, and an act of deterministically routing the content request to the identified edge caching server without first determining whether the edge routing server contains the requested content.