Improving Windows Azure Storage Throughput Using the Content Delivery Network

Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) caches your Windows Azure Data Storage blobs at strategically placed locations around the world (18 at the time of this blog post). The purpose of the CDN is to provide maximum bandwidth for delivery of content to our applications and users. Building massively scalable applications requires squeezing every ounce of juice possible from the infrastructure and machinery. The CDN significantly improves retrieval performance for our most frequently used anonymously accessible read-only data.

The CDN works by caching the first request made to retrieve a blob from Windows Azure Data Storage using a specialized URL that maps to our data storage account. It then keeps the results of that query in that geographically localized cache so that subsequent requests to the same blob can be performed from the cache, which is much faster than the original trip to fetch the blob from the more geographically distant data center. Any blob requested through a special CDN URL will be served from the local cache until its Time To Live (TTL) has expired, in which case a fresh copy of the blob will be retrieved from data center blob storage with a fresh TTL. As the first request still requires retrieval from data center storage, frequently used blobs will receive the greatest performance boost. There is no performance advantage to serving infrequently used blobs through the CDN. Because the emphasized purpose of the CDN is to improve throughput, it is only available for anonymous access of public blob containers, thereby eliminating the overhead of authentication and authorization. At the time of this blog post, the CDN was still a Community Technology Preview feature. You can turn it on in the Data Storage configuration page of the Windows Azure Developer Portal.

To learn more about the CDN, please start with this article on the Windows Azure Team Blog located here.