Office 365 CDN Advantages?

Copper Contributor

The files hosted in Office 365 CDN will be served from a specific region(where the tenant is hosted). 

 

If this correct,

 

  • What are all the additional benefits we will get over other CDN providers such as Akamai? 
  • Our tenant is subscriped in US and we have users in different countries. What will be the performance? 
  • Can we host json, aspx, html files in Office 365 CDN?
7 Replies
Hi Joseph,
quick answers for your topics.

- Benefit is the easily publishing through adding an item to a SharePoint library. From admin perspective you can easily control who can do this and getting files to the CDN is as easy as uploading them to SharePoint. In the end this service does use normal CDN providers in the background. There's also no additional costs for you on top of Office 365 subscription.
- Performance impact is hard to define, but you should see significantly faster performance related on the assets, which are getting published from the CDN
- You can technically host any static files from the CDN. aspx files are typically dynamic and would require server side handling, so those are not really usable through CDN.

Hi Vesa, 

 

Thank you for the response. 

 

Can we upload the aspx/html files in the sharepoint library and refer it using document library URL instead of Office 365 CDN URL? 

Hi @Joseph Velliah,

you can absolutely reference aspx and html pages in the SharePoint context like typically with SharePoint, without CDN usage. This is like it has been for years and CDN does not change this.

 

I might be now missing some scenario details around what you'd like to achieve and if so, please provide some additional details. thx.

Hi @Vesa Juvonen,

We would like to know more about global assets required outside of SharePoint Online. An example would be image references being exposed through exchange emails from workflows. We struggled with these when they reside in SharePoint, but they work fine through Akamai.

Hi @Vesa Juvonen

 

Also we have created a custom control block to copy item url in document libraries. This will redirect the user to a aspx page hosted in CDN with some query strings and the javascript code written inside the aspx page will process the query string and update the DOM elements at run time. I am not sure this will work in Office 365 CDN. 

Hi Joseph,

there are no global assets which are required outside of SharePoint Online. If you keep your assets in normal SharePoint libraries, they are secured and require authentication. CDN capability does not change this in anyway, unless tenant administrator enables explicitly public CDN in that particular library, like explained in the blog post.

 

"This will redirect the user to a aspx page hosted in CDN" - CDN is just a tool to publish a web site closer to the user. You will still need to host the aspx file somewhere, like in Azure, where it will be processed using server side code, if it contains that. Office 365 CDN is for static assets, like mentioned within the blog post. You can use that to copy static assets to CDN, so that they are served faster for the end users - but dynamic files requiring server side execution (like aspx) are not supported.

Hi @Vesa Juvonen

 

Thank you for the suggestions. 

 

We will explore the same and come back to you if we have any questions.