Azure blob storage and its CDN performance?

Question

In case one's website only targets a single geographical region, is there still benefit to serve the resource from Azure CDN instead of directly from Blob storage? Would the CDN be better in handling high traffic condition (more parallel access to the resource)?

Answer 1

If you plan to grow the website or users have VPNs that could potentially alter network patterns, a CDN might be a good option. A CDN has to copy the files from blob storage and caches based on internal conventions or settings. Essentially you are adding additional instructions in front of a CDN.

Also note the Azure CDN API is pretty simple and not as robust as Akamai or other CDNs..you can compare the APIs. For example, if you want to serve the file from an in memory cache, it is probably better to have a service abstracted from it. This allows you to control how the bytes are sent down to the client explicitly..there is a huge difference in accessing small files, medium files or large files...which might provide much better performance depending on your needs.

In my opinion, I would not bother with a CDN.

Answer 2

A CDN (regardless of provider) won't help you that much if the edge servers are not near where your web consumers are. Will it provide better scale out of requests? Maybe. The only certainty is that it will cost you more :).

I'd recommend start off without a CDN, make your resource references easily updateable so you can switch to a CDN if need be (regardless of who provides the CDN service).