Windows Azure CDN

(Content Delivery Network)

By moving content closer to where it is needed and used, CDN improves performance by caching content at locations closest to your customers or users to provide the best experience for your application. CDN is a managed service that is operated by Microsoft and has a 99.9% monthly SLA.

The CDN service supports highly available services such as Windows Update, and Bing Maps, to serve hundreds of millions of devices and users every day.

The CDN has many uses for cloud-based applications:

Delivery of static content

The CDN can deliver content from a number of Windows Azure resources including Windows Azure storage and Windows Azure compute roles. Content types include web objects (e.g. JPG, CSS, and JavaScript), downloadable objects (media files such as pictures, software, and documents), applications, and other components of Internet delivery (DNS, routes, and database queries).

Delivery of streaming media

The CDN can deliver fragments of media files for the delivery of dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP content. This enables streaming high quality video content at scale to large audiences.

Capabilities and Benefits of CDN

Fully integrated

CDN is completely integrated with Windows Azure Storage services, so it just takes a click to enable CDN delivery through the Windows Azure Portal.

Large global footprint

Located in the United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America, the CDN offers developers a global solution for delivering high-bandwidth content. A CDN customer's traffic may not be served out of the physically “closest” node; many factors are involved including routing and peering, Internet “weather”, and node capacity and availability. We are continually grooming our network to meet our Service Level Agreements and our customers’ requirements.

Pricing and Metering for Azure CDN

CDN charges are incurred for data requests it receives and for the data it transfers out to satisfy these requests. CDN charges will not include fees associated with transferring this data from Windows Azure Storage to CDN. Any data transfers and storage transactions incurred to get data from Windows Azure Storage to the CDN will be charged separately at our normal Windows Azure Storage rates.

Visit MSDN for more information.