Introduction to CDN in Azure

The following article provides an outline on CDN in Azure. It is a global solution for a content delivery network(CDN) with low latency for delivering high bandwidth content. Azure CDNs uses a distributed network of servers to deliver high bandwidth content and it caches the content of users and stores the content on servers closest to the end-users which helps in reducing latency. Azure CDN mostly uses caching to improve performance by some dynamic data. Azure won’t be able to cache and store to endpoint in that CDN uses various network optimization on POP (point-of-presence of server) to accelerate dynamic content.

How to create CDN in Azure?

Content delivery networks help to store video files in edge servers so that global users can access the same.

Pre-requisites:

Need Azure account with valid email address and password, also need azure subscription to use Microsoft Azure storage.

Step 1: Sign in into the Microsoft Azure Portal using below URL.

https://portal.azure.com/

Below Azure Home Page will be opened:

Step 2: Select Create a resource from the Azure portal home page, it will show the page with all the services as below:

Step 3: Select Web App from the New page of portal.

Step 4: Select CDN from the newly populated featured pane as below.

Step 5: Cdn Profile page will be opened, provide CDN name as you desired also select Resource Group and Pricing tier from the dropdown.

Do not check the Create a new CDN endpoint now checkbox.

Step 6: Click on the Create button, it will take some time to deploy and validation will start as below.

Step 7: After the successful creation of the CDN profile, in notification icon message displays as “Successfully created a CDN profile”.

Step 8: Click on the Successfully created a CDN profile from Step 7 page to display the CDN profile you just created.

How to create CDN for Custom Origin in Azure?

Microsoft Azure CDN supports four types of Origin types as below:

• Storage
• Cloud Services
• Web App
• Custom Origin

Here we will see how to create a CDN for Custom origin which is nothing but an origin web browser for public access which can be hosted in Azure or Anywhere.

Step 1: Go to All Services and select Web from left pane and click on CDN profilers to check recently created CDN profiles.

Step 2: CDN profiles page displays all the CDN profiles created, select one of the CDN profile as below.

Step 3: Select + Endpoint From the CDN profile pane as below.

Step 4: In the Add an endpoint enter the name of the endpoint you desire.

Step 5: Origin Type is a drop-down list which displays all four origin type, here select origin type as Custom origin.

Step 6: Origin hostname field takes the URL of the custom link or the IP address and it will pull the content from the origin, do not use https/http or any trailing slashes in the URL of the hostname.

Step 7: Click on Add it takes around 8-10 minutes to create an endpoint for the custom origin and in the notification, icon notification will display as “Successfully created the CDN endpoint”.

Click on Successfully created the CDN endpoint to navigate to the endpoint.

How to Manage CDN in Azure?

Here we will see how to manage the CDN azure to control the delivery of content.

Step 1: Go to the CDN you want to manage, select CDN profile from All Services page.

Step 2: Select the CDN endpoint you want to manage it will open a CDN endpoint from CDN profile.

Step 3: Select Geo-filtering option from the Setting section, this setting will allow you to control the filtering based on location. It has two options Configure to allow or block.

Step 4: Based on country code users can manage in which country to block and which country to block the content.

Step 5: To manage Compression, select Compression under the Setting section as below.

Based on requirement users can either keep the compression configuration as on or off. There are several other compression checklists provided for users.

Step 6: To manage the cache in the CDN, under-setting section click on Caching rules which helps to control the content.

Step 7: Cache setting is provided with the three different queries caching behavior as :

• Ignore Query Strings
• Bypass caching for query strings
• Cache every unique URL

Based on the requirement user can set the content caching behavior.

Advantages

Microsoft Azure Content delivery network offers many advantages to the user to deliver content globally:

• It reduces the latency to provide high bandwidth content.
• Azure CDN offers an improved user experience and high performance while using an application which loads content repeatedly.
• It has high scalability to handle large volume data loads.
• It stores the content on the edge servers which are near to the user and provides a content directory to the user with less traffic.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we learned how Microsoft Azure handles content delivery on a global level and CDN helps to share the web-based content on a global level and using CDN endpoint users can manage which country or location data can be accessed also has the option to host data on custom origin domain.

This has been a guide to CDN in Azure. Here we discuss the introduction to create CDN in Azure and how to manage CDN with advantages. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

1. Azure Components
2. Azure Services
3. Azure IoT Edge
4. What Is Azure?

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