Okay. I finally got around to trying out Windows Azure CDN. CDN could be a god-send for companies trying to serve a global userbase. Currently, lot of them essentially force their global users from around the world to connect to US based data centers. The latency in delivering content becomes really high when content happens to be something like video, audio or similar such media that requires high bandwidth throughput.
The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) offers a global solution for delivering such high-bandwidth content that's hosted (cached) in strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering content to end users.
In it's current avatar, CDN is not suitable for many requirements (that can potentially benefit from such a service) because of inherent limitations in terms of secuirty, content type supported, etc. But I defnitely see those limitations going away in next few releases.
Following are the key attributes of this service that one should understand to be able to decide if CDN is the right fit for a solution:
1. CDN delivers cached content at strategically located physical nodes in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. A latest list of nodes is available at the following url: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg680302.aspx
2. Microsoft cannot (and doesn't) guarantee that the content will be served from the closest possible node to the user because it's dependent upon many different factor such as current load, availability, node capacity, etc. This is very critical for organizations that have conpliance requirements such as HIPAA, etc.
3. It works better for Windows Azure blobs and static contents. It may not be a good idea to use CDN for contents that are frequently refreshed or need to be generated based on real-time data.
4. CDN is an add-on feature to your Azure subscription (that needs to be enabled through the Azure Management Portal) and costs extra.
5. Only blobs that are publically available (anonymous access) can be cached with the Windows Azure CDN.
6. If you use CDN to cache Azure hosted services, it's recommended to enable CDN only for static content. Enabling CDN for dyanamically generated content or services will cost more, and may even have a negative impact on the performance.
7. You can set the "time-to-live" setting for content in CDN. If a content has expired in CDN, the call is re-directed to the blob or stoarge service to get the latest content; and is cached by CDN for subsequent calls (till the content expires again after time-to-live setting passes).
Happy CDN'ing !!
The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) offers a global solution for delivering such high-bandwidth content that's hosted (cached) in strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering content to end users.
In it's current avatar, CDN is not suitable for many requirements (that can potentially benefit from such a service) because of inherent limitations in terms of secuirty, content type supported, etc. But I defnitely see those limitations going away in next few releases.
Following are the key attributes of this service that one should understand to be able to decide if CDN is the right fit for a solution:
1. CDN delivers cached content at strategically located physical nodes in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America. A latest list of nodes is available at the following url: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg680302.aspx
2. Microsoft cannot (and doesn't) guarantee that the content will be served from the closest possible node to the user because it's dependent upon many different factor such as current load, availability, node capacity, etc. This is very critical for organizations that have conpliance requirements such as HIPAA, etc.
3. It works better for Windows Azure blobs and static contents. It may not be a good idea to use CDN for contents that are frequently refreshed or need to be generated based on real-time data.
4. CDN is an add-on feature to your Azure subscription (that needs to be enabled through the Azure Management Portal) and costs extra.
5. Only blobs that are publically available (anonymous access) can be cached with the Windows Azure CDN.
6. If you use CDN to cache Azure hosted services, it's recommended to enable CDN only for static content. Enabling CDN for dyanamically generated content or services will cost more, and may even have a negative impact on the performance.
7. You can set the "time-to-live" setting for content in CDN. If a content has expired in CDN, the call is re-directed to the blob or stoarge service to get the latest content; and is cached by CDN for subsequent calls (till the content expires again after time-to-live setting passes).
Happy CDN'ing !!
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