Azure Content Delivery Network

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A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that can efficiently deliver web content to users. CDNs' store cached content on edge servers in point-of-presence (POP) locations that are close to end users, to minimize latency.

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) offers developers a global solution for rapidly delivering high-bandwidth content to users by caching their content at strategically placed physical nodes across the world. Azure CDN can also accelerate dynamic content, which cannot be cached, by leveraging various network optimizations using CDN POPs. For example, route optimization to bypass Border Gateway Protocol (BGP).

for Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) products. Each metro may contain more than one POP. For example, Azure CDN from Microsoft has 118 POPs across 100 metro cities.

The benefits of using Azure CDN to deliver web site assets include:

• Better performance and improved user experience for end users, especially when using applications in which multiple round-trips are required to load content.

• Large scaling to better handle instantaneous high loads, such as the start of a product launch event.

• Distribution of user requests and serving of content directly from edge servers so that less traffic is sent to the origin server.

Azure CDN features -

• Dynamic site acceleration

• CDN caching rules

• HTTPS custom domain support

• Azure diagnostics logs

• File compression

• Geo-filtering

How CDN Works –

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) includes four products:

• Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft

• Azure CDN Standard from Akamai

• Azure CDN Standard from Verizon

• Azure CDN Premium from Verizon.

Follow the link to compares the features available with each product.

How Azure Content Delivery is used?

The Azure Content Delivery Network offers developers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content by caching the content on different locations. The caching capability by Azure helps in ;

• Better performance and user experience for end-users who are far from the destination content source or where there are many intermediary nodes in between to reach the content.

• Ability to scale to handle instantaneous high load and demand

• Caching content from publicly available Azure storage blobs

• Caching web content, images, scripts, and other website content from CDN

• Enables in caching objects to the CDN that are provided by an Azure cloud service

• Cache content based on specific query strings

• Accessing cached content from a custom domain name by mapping the CDN HTTP Endpoint.

What to monitor in Azure CDN for performance?

Some of the key metrics & data to look for when evaluating CDN for performance includes;

• Connect time – Ensure that CDN has the best network connectivity with minimal latency and packet loss, even under peak usage

• Wait time – The time it takes to deliver the content from the CDN to the requesting node – the less the better.

• Throughput– Ensure that the overall throughput of the CDN is higher than the origin

• Caching– Monitor overall Cache Hits and Misses