• 2 min read

Accelerate your websites with Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-edge

Today, we are thrilled to announce the preview of the Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-grade edge powered by Azure Front Door which enables faster page loads, enhanced security, and high availability for your global apps with no configuration or additional code required.

Site performance is crucial when creating applications on the modern web. It has a direct impact on user experience, search engine rankings, and user conversion rates. With Azure Static Web Apps, we’re committed to building a platform that helps you deliver the best results for your users at a global scale. It provides streamlined full-stack development and hosting across static content and serverless APIs to power high productivity from source code to global high availability.

Today, we are announcing the preview of the Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-grade edge powered by Azure Front Door which enables faster page loads, enhanced security, and increased reliability for your global apps with no configuration or additional code required.

Azure Front Door's Global Points of Presence (POP) and global network

Figure 1: Azure Front Door’s Global Points of Presence (POP) and global network.

“Static Web Apps has helped us deliver our solution EasyLife 365 in a fast and reliable way to our customers worldwide. I can recommend this service to everyone looking for enterprise-grade static content hosting on Azure.”—Patrick Lamber, CEO, EasyLife 365

This new feature includes enhanced protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, significantly reduces latency, and helps increase throughput for your global users.

Improve page speed

Today, with Azure Static Web Apps, when a user visits your site, our HTTP load balancer will determine the closest node to their location and serve your application from there. If any of our global regions is down, we intelligently re-route your user’s requests to the closest healthy node in the network. This enables you to build your application resiliently across regions, failover instantly, and offer your users an “always-on” website availability. Enabling the enterprise-grade edge further increases your global presence by caching your website’s static content across 118+ points of presence (POP) across 100 metro cities. As a result, your app runs with lower latency and higher throughput to your end-users.

Load test for static site with enterprise-grade edge enabled

Figure 2: Load test for a static site with enterprise-grade edge enabled.

Faster page loads will not only improve your user’s experience but will also have a positive impact on your search engine rankings and ultimately result in higher user conversion.

Secure your applications on a globally deployed network

As the number of users you serve increases, so do the chances of malicious attacks like DDoS. Enabling your applications on an enterprise-grade edge can prevent attackers from reaching your application and affecting your application’s availability and performance. The full scale and capacity of our globally deployed network provide defense against common network layer attacks through always-on traffic monitoring and real-time mitigation.

With this feature enabled, you run your websites on top of Microsoft’s global application and content delivery network that has been running the most significant web workloads for many years, ensuring its resiliency and self-recovery capabilities. Global services like Azure DevOps, LinkedIn, and Xbox Live run on top of it and deliver blazing fast and reliable application experience.

Our enterprise-grade edge is a zero-config cloud content delivery service that includes CDN and application acceleration. Once you enable this feature for your production applications, we will migrate your live traffic to our enhanced global distributed network with no downtime.

Enable enterprise-grade edge using the Azure Portal

Figure 3: Enable enterprise-grade edge using the Azure portal.

With this new feature, Azure Static Web Apps streamlines everything you need to deliver the most secure and fastest experience for your users. We continue to be amazed by what you are building and can’t wait to see how this will empower you and your users to achieve more!

Get started with Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-grade edge today