What is Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network)?
Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is CDN service provided by Azure Cloud Platform that enables storing and accessing data on different content servers and locations – used by online or cloud services.
Azure CDN helps in providing better bandwidth and quick delivery of data by placing content delivery or storage servers near to users ( in different geographical locations)
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.
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
Azure CDN Features
Azure CDN offers the following key features.
Dynamic site acceleration
CDN caching rules
HTTPS custom domain support
Azure diagnostics logs
File compression
Geo-filtering
Azure CDN includes four products:
- Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft
- Azure CDN Standard from Akamai
- Azure CDN Standard from Verizon
- Azure CDN Premium from Verizon.
Limitations
Each Azure subscription has default limits for the following resources:
The number of CDN profiles that can be created.
The number of endpoints that can be created in a CDN profile.
The number of custom domains that can be mapped to an endpoint.
For more information about CDN subscription limits, see CDN limits.
Top comments (1)
Well written!!!
I think azure CDN is more rich in terms of different products as compared to AWS cloudfront
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