Azure Content Delivery Network or Azure CDN is a network of servers that can deliver web content to the users.
How can you use Azure CDN and how can it help you?
Azure CDN offers the developers a solution to deliver high-bandwidth content to the users. It caches the content in well-positioned physical nodes around the world.
Azure CDN accelerates dynamic content that cannot be cached using multiple network optimisations.
User experience is the most significant part of online content delivery. Azure CDN allows to save bandwidth and reduce loading time while you develop mobile applications or websites.
How does Azure CDN Work?
Azure CDN allows to cache information that does not change very often. Today, it has servers in 70+ cities around the world. However, if you do not find your location in this list, you can use Akamai or Verizon networks.
CDN stores files in a given way.
When the user requires a file, they can access it easily. They need not use IOs from hard disk or recover them from the database.
The prime advantage of using Azure CDN is easy accessibility for end users. The users can download the files very fast, which is certainly an advantage!
You can use Azure CDN for maintenance of style sheets, images, files, documents and client scripts. CDN also helps to bring down the amount of details that are to be processed.
Advantages of Using Azure CDN
Why should you use Azure CDN?
Let us check out on the many advantages of using Azure CDN for delivering website assets:
- Improved user experience and better performance for end users, especially while using applications where multiple roundtrips are necessary to load content.
- Better handling of instantaneous higher loads, for example, in the beginning of a product launch.
- Lesser traffic to the source server as user requests are distributed and content is served directly from the edge servers.
What Do You Require for Using Azure CDN
You need to subscribe to Azure for using Azure CDN.
You will also require at least one CDN profile, that is a collection of CDN endpoints. For organising your CDN endpoints through web application, internet domain or any other criteria, you can use several profiles.
How to Start Using Azure CDN?
To use CDN for your project, you need to do the following:
- Create CDN service profile on Azure
- Include CDN endpoints to profile
- Enable CDN.
Limitations
Each Azure subscription imposes a limitation on the following:
- Number of CDN profiles you can create
- Number of endpoints you can create for a CDN profile
- Number of custom domains you can map to an endpoint.
Azure CDN is one of the most popular global cache options. This will lighten download of files like style sheets and JavaScript scripts that change very little with time. Moreover, this is quite inexpensive and easy to use and configure as a tool. Make sure not to include sensitive information as files here are public.
