With the exponential increase in data demand and the emergence of technologies that require ultra-fast loading, high scalability, and resilience—such as e-commerce, streaming, online gaming, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and VR (Virtual Reality)—events like unavailability, high loading times and poor user experience have become frequent even for companies that already use the services of major CDN providers. These deeply undesirable occurrences demonstrate that to meet market demands, the legacy CDN service is no longer enough.
Even though these services place data closer to end users than in conventional cloud architectures, legacy CDNs still have many limitations regarding the type of content they can deliver, typically restricted to static pages, and lack the processing capabilities that modern web applications demand.
What’s the solution? Using an ultra-fast and reliable CDN service based on an edge computing platform.
Advantages of a Content Delivery Network on an Edge Computing Platform
Implementing content distribution over an edge computing platform enhances caching beyond static content, extending capillarity, scalability, reliability, and processing capabilities also to dynamic content. Additionally, it facilitates adaptation to market changes and the emergence of new technologies.
Check out how content delivery operates within Azion’s plataform, focusing on the factors we consider most relevant: performance, security, and availability.
Performance
Several features on Azion’s Edge Computing Platform elevate content delivery to new levels. Among them, we can highlight:
- The extensive capillarity of our edge network, with over 100 points of presence worldwide, allowing data to be delivered anywhere in the Americas and Europe in up to 30 ms;
- The possibility to create truly distributed applications running directly at the edge with Edge Functions, with automatic scalability according to demand, and without the need to host and run those applications in a central location;
- The adoption of open standards, facilitating the integration of third-party solutions in your applications.
When the UNINTER university moved the content distribution of its digital courses from the cloud to the edge, using Azion’s CDN combined with our Edge Application solution, it saw a 30-fold performance gain, along with a 90% reduction in data traffic from the origin.
Meanwhile, the fintech Contabilizei increased the performance of its accounting services platform by 73% and reduced front-end costs by 96%, thanks to features like Edge Functions, which optimize request delivery at the edge, and Azion’s Rules Engine, which allowed them to create advanced cache rules according to the company’s needs.
Security and Compliance
Azion’s Edge Computing Platform allows you to add an extra layer of protection to your origin infrastructure, applications, websites, APIs, and user devices, without the need for code changes, making its implementation easier.
Our multi-layered cybersecurity stack simplifies the adoption of practices like Zero Trust and programmable security and is capable of neutralizing the most critical security risks for web applications, known as the OWASP Top 10, as well as other advanced and zero-day threats. Our Web Application Firewall (WAF) proved immune to zero-day attacks able to bypass solutions offered by many competitors. And all that without compromising the performance of your content distribution.
If your activity requires strict compliance, it’s worth noting that Azion meets the most demanding security requirements on the market, with PCI DSS v4.0, SOC 2 Type 2, and SOC 3 certifications valid in all its points of presence, an umatched differential in the market. Furthermore, the highly distributed nature of our edge network makes it easier to adapt to local data privacy legislation of each region in which you operate.
Features like these led Azion to be recognized by Forrester as a Strong Performer, in addition to receiving other recognitions from prestigious entities, such as GigaOm, Gartner, and Frost & Sullivan.
Availability
Our platform’s CDN feature, called Edge Cache, takes advantage of the capillarity of our more than 100 edge locations to ensure the availability of your content, services, and applications.
This allows actions like on-demand scalability without needing to transfer data to the cloud, seamless traffic transitions, and, with Edge Functions, developing a much larger access routing capacity than a traditional CDN service. Ultimately, this results in 100% availability, backed by an SLA.
Conclusion
The strategy of addressing issues like unavailability, high load times, and poor user experience with legacy CDNs has proven ineffective due to the limitations discussed in this article. Thus, the best solution to ensure that your websites and applications, whether static or dynamic, deliver the best experience with guaranteed security and 100% availability is to bring them to Azion’s Edge Computing Platform.
Try out our platform and see its impact on your website: sign up for a free account and get $300 in service credits. To purchase more credits or learn more about what modern content delivery truly means, talk to our experts.
