Three Key CDN Optimization Strategies

When an organization focuses on optimizing web and application performance across its portfolio, even the smallest improvements can yield a meaningful performance boost. If you’re at all concerned with improving your performance (and who isn’t?), then you should consider evaluating your existing content delivery network (CDN) tooling and strategy.

Fastly believes there are three keys to better performance that you should evaluate within your existing tooling, or when considering switching to or adopting a new CDN; advanced caching, advanced origin offload, and real-time insights and configurability. Below you’ll find a deeper dive into these three keys to better performance and indicators to look for when evaluating a CDN.

Advanced Caching

Sure, all CDNs provide some level of caching capabilities - they help you to reduce latency by delivering content from a location closer to your user and improve load times. But does your CDN truly offer ‘advanced’ caching?

Modern CDNs offer a key capability that allows you to cache more; they can cache ‘dynamic’ or frequently changing content (think account info, location-specific products, changing inventory, new headlines). Traditional CDN customers suffer, as their traffic has to return all the way back to the origin, which results in slower response times, increased infrastructure expenses, and more associated costs for egress data for those numerous (unnecessary) responses. Instead, modern CDNs make it possible for your company to serve truly dynamic content that changes with every request from the edge, rather than from origin. This gives you the ability to run your code closer to the end user, eliminating costly and time-consuming performance degradations.

Advanced Origin Offload

The CDN you choose should remove the ‘strain’ or ‘tax’ on your origin. By minimizing the requests and demand on your origin, you enhance the overall performance of your network, sites and apps, and can enjoy decreased costs and time constraints. Cache hit ratio gets a lot of attention, but it’s not the full story. In this blog post, Fastly engineers describe that a better measure for evaluating total offload to a CDN is origin offload. This measure focuses on server efficiency, and the number of bytes served from cache vs. origin, rather than just the number of requests. An origin offload of 100% means all bytes were served from the CDN. So what can you do to increase origin offload? Here are two key strategies that can have a huge impact on origin offload, on your performance, and on your egress bills.

• Origin shielding: Shielding can significantly lower the strain on your origin by drastically cutting both the number of requests and the amount of data served. It also speeds up cache miss responses, which even lowers latency for requests served from origin.

• Request collapsing: When request collapsing is enabled, your CDN will combine multiple requests for the same ‘object’ into a single request back to the origin. Without request collapsing, if a piece of very popular content is updated at origin, you run the risk of creating a stampede of every POP on the network sending a request to your origin at once.

Real-time Insights and Configurability

It’s impossible to know how you’re doing at something if you can’t accurately measure it and act on data in real-time. Let’s say you do everything we’ve discussed above in an effort to improve your web and app performance. Great job! But there’s a snag… without a means of accurately measuring your efforts you won’t know if (or how) you’ve improved.

If you don’t have total control over your CDN, you don’t have control over your performance. A modern CDN allows complete developer control and configurability, which means quick content changes, fine-grained control of content caching, and developer efficiency. If you need to make changes, for any reason - be it something happening in the business, teams reacting to metrics, and so on - your teams need the control to make configuration changes immediately. With the right CDN, there is no need for professional service engagements or reliance on technical teams elsewhere in the business to accomplish this. This all results in faster time-to-market and better performance.

Strategies for Optimizing CDN Performance

Ask yourself… are you using the most capability-rich CDN available that supports your efforts to improve overall delivery performance? Choosing a CDN that allows you to do more of what you do, at the edge, can help effortlessly boost your performance so you can enjoy increased revenue, speedier apps, and an overall superior user experience... And who wouldn’t want that?

If you want to dig even deeper into the above strategies, grab a copy of Need for Speed: Guide to Faster Site, App, and API Performance with Your CDN.