When delivering content to a large global audience, it is critical to ensure optimized delivery of your content. This new capability is targeted to accelerate and optimize performance based on the scenarios you may use Azure CDN to deliver. These scenarios can include general website or web application delivery, media streaming, file download, etc. Optimization will be applied by default to the scenario you specified in the “optimized for” option when you create a CDN endpoint.
Optimization that we apply includes caching, object chunking, origin failure retry policy, among others, depending on the specific scenario. Media streaming is time sensitive in that packets arriving late on the client can cause degraded viewing experience, for example, frequent buffering of video content. The new enhancements, reduces the latency for delivery of media content. For large file download, object chunking is critical. Files are requested in smaller chunks from the origin to ensure a smooth download experience. We apply these enhancements based on the experience with many customers and we will continue adding additional settings to improve content delivery performance.
You can optimize the CDN endpoint to one of the following scenarios:
- General web delivery
- General media streaming
- Video on demand media streaming
- Large file download
When creating a new CDN endpoint, simply select from the drop down that best matches your scenario.
Depending on the optimization CDN providers support and how they apply enhancement in different scenarios, “optimized for” options can vary based on the provider you select. Currently Azure CDN from Akamai supports general web delivery, general media streaming, video on demand media streaming, and large file download. Azure CDN from Verizon supports general web delivery. You can use general web delivery for video on demand and large file download. We highly recommend you to test the performance between different providers to select the optimal provider for your delivery.
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