Quickly Access Web Content using Azure Content Delivery Network

Overview

We all open websites frequently in our daily life. How fast do you usually get responses from these websites? Have you ever wondered why there is such a significant delay in response? Some pages may load quickly, others may load slowly. There are many potential causes, but in this blog, we will focus on one cause and one action we can take to fix it. Using a CDN, we can shorten the user’s physical distance from our web server and cache our images and other content to speed up the service.

Introduction

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that allows users to quickly access web content. To reduce latency, CDNs store cached content on edge servers at point-of-presence (POP) locations that are close to end users. All static resources are fetched from the primary server or resource using a CDN and cached for a period. This cached copy is then used to fulfill all user requests for CDN-related resources. Resources are refreshed with new resource requests when the cache expires.

Features of Azure Content Delivery Network

• Dynamic website acceleration

Today’s content delivered to users is mostly real-time. This is said to be due to the booming social media and e-commerce sector. Content caching for dynamic web applications is not possible in edge locations. This is because the server only generates content in response to user behavior. Therefore, it is usually difficult to accelerate the delivery of such content compared to caching static content. Therefore, when using Azure CDN dynamic website acceleration or DSA optimization, websites with dynamic content tend to perform measurably better.

• CDN caching rules

It is used to set or modify the default cache expiration behavior globally and with custom conditions such as URL path and file extension. There are two kinds of caching rules available in Azure CDN:

Global Caching Rules: Each endpoint in your profile can have one global caching rule that affects all requests to the endpoint. If any HTTP caching headers are set, the global caching rule will override them.

•  Custom Caching Rules

You can specify one or more custom caching rules for each endpoint in your profile. Custom caching rules match specific file paths and extensions, are processed in order, and, if configured, override the global caching rule.

• Custom HTTPS domain support

Azure CDN supports HTTPS by CDN endpoint hostname as the default service offering. This means that if you are creating a CDN endpoint, HTTPS will be automatically enabled in it. Enabling HTTPS over your domain is to ensure that sensitive data is connected over SSL and TLS.

• Azure diagnostic logs

Azure diagnostics logs help us to export basic usage metrics from your CDN endpoint to various sources so that you can use them however you want.

• File compression

It increases performance by compressing the files before they are delivered. The receiving browser performs file decompression. If you enable compression for files hosted on your origin server, Azure CDN transmits the compressed files to other servers without alteration.

Uncompressed files on the origin server of a type that can be compressed are dynamically compressed by Azure CDN. Once compressed, the files are then stored on the POP. The user experience and website performance are enhanced by this process.

• Geofiltration

It allows us to restrict content access by country/region. we can use this feature to create rules for specific routes on the CDN endpoint and we can set rules to allow or block content in selected countries/regions.

Benefits of Azure CDN

• Better performance for your applications and services
• Global distributed network
• Highly scalable infrastructure
• Active redundancy and failover
• High reliability
• Robust security

Parameters to monitor in Azure CDN

When evaluating CDN performance, some of the primary metrics and data to check for include:

• Throughput
• Caching
• Waiting Time
• Connect Time

Conclusion

Azure CDN is an easy and fast way to get content closer to the user. It also helps to share the web-based content on a global level and using the CDN endpoint users can manage which country or location data can be accessed also has the option to host data on a custom origin domain.

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