Azure CDN Speeds Content Delivery

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

The Windows Azure platform offers a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches data on servers around the world to speed access to customer content hosted in Microsoft’s data centers. Since Windows Azure data centers are currently online in only six locations across Asia, Europe, and North America, the CDN can improve Azure application performance for users in other parts of the world. The CDN can also help performance by distributing load across servers. However, CDN use incurs charges, and the only content that it can cache is blobs deployed to Windows Azure Storage.

Videos, Documents, Other Blobs Cacheable

Windows Azure, one of three primary services offered by the Windows Azure platform (the others are SQL Azure and Azure AppFabric), provides a hosted Windows Server—based OS in Microsoft data centers where customers can deploy applications. Although the SQL Azure Database service offers hosted relational database functionality, the Windows Azure service also provides data storage capabilities (albeit, nonrelational) known as Windows Azure Storage.

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