Content Delivery Networks (CDN) help bring your content closer to your users all over the world. One key way the CDN improves latency is by intelligently caching files on CDN edge servers located in various geographic regions. This new feature allows customers using Azure CDN standard from Verizon or Akamai to create rules to direct the CDN servers to override their default caching behavior. Azure CDN from Premium customers would still be able to use the Rules Engine to manage their cache.
This feature will allow you to specify cache duration of a specific file, files under a path, or specific file extensions to be cached based on values specified to the CDN. Many users find this easier than managing cache directive headers on the origin server itself.
For example, you may wish to cache all files that end in .jpg for one year, since they don’t change often, but cache files under the directory /news for only an hour since that can change frequently.
In addition, users of the Dynamic Site Delivery optimization will now be able to deliver mixed (dynamic and static) content from a single endpoint by enabling caching for static files.
To learn more about how caching works and the default behavior on the different Optimization Types, see our documentation on How Caching Works.
To jump right into using caching rules, see our documentation on how to Control Azure CDN caching behavior with caching rules.