Using a CDN is a well known way to increase the performance of your web site. At $0.087 per GB, I figured why not give the Azure CDN a try.

My first concern was I didn't want to have to push assets, especially css, to the CDN as a separate step in my release process. I found a decent guide on setting up origin pull for the Azure CDN. That post shows the old portal. The process in the new portal is a bit nicer, but the concepts are the same.

I did run into a couple of issues which may help you out.

I was confused at first, but the simple choice was setting the Endpoint Type as web app. Once I chose my site, most of the other options were filled in.

For some reason, the Standard Verizon option didn't work well for me. It has a 90 minute propagation time and I couldn't quite seem to get things working consistently. Since the Standard Akamai option has a 1 minute propagation time, I switched to that. The CDN worked quite smoothly from there.

To switch, I had to delete the CDN in azure portal and set it back up again. Fortunately, the names I used were released and avaialble again the second time.

The other thing I ran into was Font Awesome webfonts were not loading correctly. It turned out to be a CORS issue. After wandering around for a bit trying to figure out how to change the CORS settings for the CDN itself, I found out I could add the settings to the web.config of my site.

<system.webServer>
    <httpProtocol>
      <customHeaders>
        <add name="Access-Control-Allow-Origin" value="*"/>
      </customHeaders>
    </httpProtocol>
</system.webServer>

I also managed to setup a custom domain, so instead of kijanawoodard.azureedge.net, my static files are served from cdn.kijanawoodard.com.

Everything appears to be serving correctly now. It's amazing how easy doing things like this has become.

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