Today, we are very excited to announce that Azure Media Services is fully integrated with Azure CDN. Azure CDN can be easily enabled for any Media Services streaming endpoint by using the Azure Management Portal or via the Media Services REST API 2.9 or .NET SDK 3.1.0.2. This allows you to leverage the capabilities of our worldwide CDN POPs to easily scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of viewers and to improve performance. The CDN is designed to cache and deliver content to end users from a CDN POP that is as close as possible to them. By moving content close to the user, delivery time is reduced and the overall user experience can be significantly improved.
Without CDN, users access media content directly from the data center associated with your Azure Media Services account. This is an ideal workflow to use when you have a limited number of users (e.g. a few hundred) and they are all located near the Azure data center you are using for Azure Media Services. When you have a larger number of local or globally distributed users (e.g. thousands) it is recommended that you enable Azure CDN to improve performance.
Pricing benefits:
- Without CDN, you are charged for each streaming unit and outbound traffic from the Azure data center. With CDN, you are only charged for the outbound traffic from the CDN POPs to end users.
- Azure CDN is pay-as-you-go model. Unlike other providers there is no CDN specific minimum commitment or additional contract required. For full CDN pricing details, see http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cdn/.
Key characteristics:
- Data center availability: Currently CDN integration is enabled in US West, Japan West, and Japan East. The following data centers will be enabled soon: US East, North Europe, West Europe, South East Asia and East Asia.
- Streaming hostname: Your streaming endpoint hostname remains the same after enabling CDN. You don’t need to make any changes to your media services workflow after CDN is enabled. For example, if your streaming endpoint hostname is strasbourg.streaming.mediaservices.windows.net, after enabling CDN, the exact same hostname is used.
- Streaming unit: You need to have at least one media services streaming unit to be able to enable CDN. By default when you create a new streaming endpoint a streaming unit is automatically enabled.
- Activation time: After enabling CDN, it takes two hours for the changes to be active across all the CDN POPs.
- Enabling CDN: For new streaming endpoints, you can enable CDN simply by creating a new endpoint; for existing streaming endpoints, you will need to first stop the endpoint and then enable the CDN.
- Allowed requests: When CDN is enabled for a streaming endpoint, clients cannot request content directly from the origin. If you need the ability to test your content with or without CDN you can create another streaming endpoint that isn’t CDN enabled.
For more information on steps to enable CDN from Azure Portal for Streaming Endpoint, visit: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/media-services-manage-origins/