Azure CDN vs. Azure Traffic Manager

Azure CDN has at hand an infinity of applications and tools to implement in your system and have better control of your data in a clean and secure platform on the web, we recommend this program since the percentage of solutions provided by this program is very high and find a way to make each user's job easier.

Incentivized

Azure Traffic Manager is a great product, if you have multiple sites hosting similar services (Primary and DR), and you want to ensure that users are directed to the DR in case of a primary datacenter failure, [Azure] Traffic Manager does this very nicely. If you have a service hosted across multiple regions/datacenters and you want to balance the inbound load between the regions, [Azure] Traffic Manager does this very well, of course such scenario would require a database replication or something like Cosmos-DB in the backend [Azure Traffic Manager] is also well suited for inbound traffic with multiple IPs, you can fail-over traffic from one inbound IP to another based on its availability, or if you have multiple internet connections that you want to balance the load across, it does this pretty nicely too.

Incentivized

• New websites can be boosted up quickly
• Easily scalable according to our performance requirements
• Easy integration with other Azure services
• You only pay for what you need

Incentivized

• Performance DNS Load Balancing for Lowest Latency Endpoint to Clients
• Priority-Based DNS Load Balancing to ensure maximum up time for a service
• Geographic-based DNS Load Balancing to force certain clients in certain regions to connect to specific endpoints

Incentivized

• For the longest time they didn't have a robust SDK. They have one now, but it could be better.
• The different flavors of Azure CDN (Akamai, Verizon, etc) have different costs, but not well differentiated features. Might be confusing to new users.
• I'm not overly familiar with it, but AWS does have a programmability in their CDN offering (Lambda @ Edge) and Azure doesn't seem to have an equivalent (Azure Functions is region-specific).

Incentivized

• Traffic View is a great feature, but doesn't work very well, sometimes it gets stuck and stops loading traffic view data
• Automatic probing for endpoints sometimes gets stuck too, I would recommend a technique to test the endpoint in real time from Azure Portal
• Traffic View heatmap is buggy and doesn't point correctly to locations
• Traffic View portal doesn't show source countries (Shows coordinates) it would be much more helpful to have coordinates auto-translated to geolocations/countries

Incentivized

I give it 9/10 rating because it solved my problem by Caching my website content on global servers to load faster.

Great support from the team whenever we're stuck. Very proactive in resolving issues and also making changes as per the requirements of the organization.

Incentivized

We did not evaluate any other CDN's before we selected Azure. We heavily use Azure for our development and infrastructure efforts so choosing the Azure CDN was easy. The only thing we compared it to was standing up a Windows Server VM and pointing a CDN URL to it allowing it to serve as a file server, which was much more cumbersome.

Incentivized

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow does what [Azure] Traffic Manager does, however, in Azure Configuration is separated between Azure DNS Zones (For DNS Zone Management) and [Azure] Traffic Manager for DNS Traffic Management and Load Balancing, Route 53 in a unified product for DNS Traffic Management using Traffic Flow and DNS Zone Management. Route 53 does a great job, however, we found it to be a little bit more complex to setup than [Azure] Traffic Manager, Setting up traffic manager is pretty easy even for the first time, and getting the best out of it is relatively simple.

Incentivized

• Azure CDN reduced origin instance load by removing the need to constantly serve large numbers of static files, meaning applications can be deployed with smaller/fewer instances.
• Azure CDN reduces apparent load times to customers by serving cached files out of POPs in the local region of those clients, instead of requiring those clients to make multiple, lengthy requests through to the origin servers.

Incentivized

• Service cost is exceptionally low
• Overall, this product saves a lot of money for the value it provides and it isn't expensive
• It's around half a dollar per million queries, which is truly peanuts, extras may be required if you do advanced configuration
• I can't see any reason why any business wouldn't be using this product, very low investment for a very high return and savings

Incentivized