We are very excited to announce a number of powerful new features and capabilities that take Azure CDN to the next level. Azure CDN is also now available in the new Azure portal via two new SKUs: CDN Standard and CDN Premium. Both these SKUs offer a great new experience for enabling and managing your CDN and provide access to new CDN POPs in India, Australia and South America.

CDN Premium with new advanced features

In addition to the features available in Azure CDN Standard, CDN Premium offers an extensive set of advanced capabilities, including a rules engine that provides very granular control on how and when your content is served and advanced and real time analytic modules that allow you to better understand your users and how they are interacting with your content using historical and real-time data.

The rules engine allows one to define the criteria that a request must take before one or more actions can take effect. A rule can be triggered by a large set of criteria that includes properties in the client request or URL, country that request came from, or even details such as manufacturer or screen resolution for requests from mobile devices. A very extensive set of actions can be defined for each rule and includes modifying request/response headers, redirecting requests, allowing or denying access to content, or modifying cache control headers.

The advanced and real time analytic modules provide a very extensive set of rich and granular analytics. A small sampling of the analytics available includes the following: user requests across countries and cities, top files requested, top browsers making requests, and client requests broken out by user agents, referrers, client IPs, and URLs.

API support​

APIs are now available for all features in CDN Standard, including core CDN configuration management (create/update/delete CDN hostname, customer domain, origin, etc.), purge, compression, and query strings. For CDN Premium, core CDN configuration management and purge are available.

Purge

Purging support has been our number one request from our customers. You can now purge via the portal or API to “instantly” remove content from the CDN so it can be refreshed from your origin server. Individual URLs or all content for a CDN endpoint can be easily purged from the CDN.

Existing feature optimization for CDN Standard

The CDN Standard SKU expands and optimizes the capabilities available via the current Azure Portal. Updates, including the following, greatly simplify creating and updating configuration for a CDN endpoint:

• HTTP and HTTPS are turned on by default for a CDN endpoint, you can now easily disable HTTP if HTTPS-only support is required
• A custom origin port can now be specified
• Compression and query strings settings can be applied for individual endpoint​

New local CDN delivery regions in India, Australia and South America

Performance in these geographies is now greatly improved via local delivery and is supported with new pricing zones. In India four new POPs have been added in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai. In Australia POPs in Melbourne and Sydney are now available for all customers. Previously, these POPs were not available for all customers to use. In South America two new POPs have been added in São Paulo, Brazil and Quito, Ecuador. Additional POP deployments throughout South America are scheduled over the next several months. Additional updates will be provided when these become available.

All CDN POPs are available by default for CDN endpoints created via API or from the new Azure Portal.

Media Services integration

Currently Media Services is integrated with Azure CDN in just the legacy Azure portal and in Media Services REST APIs. With a single click CDN can be seamlessly enabled for any streaming endpoint. The above new POPS and features from the Standard/Premium CDN SKUs are not currently available for CDN integrated streaming endpoints. Early next year new POPs will be available for these endpoints. Development work is on-going to make Media Services available in the new Azure Portal. Later next year when this is complete, the new Azure Portal Standard/Premium CDN SKUs will also be available.

Current Azure portal migration

Currently only new CDN endpoints created from the new Azure portal will have access to these capabilities. In the next few months we will migrate existing customers from the current portal to the new portal. At that time, all existing CDN endpoints will have access to new POPs and features.

Visit the Azure portal to get started with your new Azure CDN experience today!