Today’s user expects reliable, personalized and fast web experience whose robustness is totally independent of the browser’s limitations, location, network or device specifications. The quest of providing the users with rich web experience resulted in slower page downloads which in turn has put the quality of entire user experience at risk.

The Standard Content Delivery Network is the latest innovation which has been introduced in Azure. CDN is equipped with the capability of caching the static files in a quicker manner which makes the delivery of the files to the end users, faster and robust. This method has a limitation though. It doesn’t aid in improving the loading speed of several APIs and the content of dynamic web apps which becomes a hindrance in the provision of unique content to the user. Microsoft Azure has come up with Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA) mechanism which aims to cache the unique and dynamic content quicker and makes sure its availability, to the users.

Microsoft azure CDN using DSA

Techniques of DSA

The Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA) comes with several techniques which aim to benefit the performance and latency of unique content, which is dynamic.

  • Network or Route Optimizations:

A most reliable and fastest path which leads to the origin to retrieve and cache the dynamic content is regularly evaluated. Of course, the content is supposed to be delivered via optimized network protocols. The next thing which is deemed necessary for the successful delivery is the usage of optimal network delivery path in order to avoid any internet congestions and unnecessary longer routes.

  • TCP Optimizations:

The internet transactions and communications which are held over the TCP, aren’t optimized w.r.t performance. In order to improve the performance of the delivery of cached content, the DSA is used to apply several TCP optimizations across the whole network. Doing this, will prove beneficial by:

  1. Accelerating the connection setup.
  2. Reducing packet loss.
  3. Increasing the packet transmission rate.
  • Resource Prefetching & Adaptive Image Compression:

Since the CDN is basically a machine learning based tool, it learns the user behavior with the passage of time and tries to fetch the most relevant and anticipated data via the application from the origin. It makes the content delivery, even faster and optimized. The adaptive image compression strategy continuously monitors the internet connection and if any slower connection is identified, it compresses the jpeg images for faster delivery of the content.

Final Word:

The DSA is currently available for Azure CDN by the Akamai. This feature is about to be released for the Verizon standard in a short while. However, if you plan to purchase the Azure CDN with DSA, it comes with an economical price tag but we hope, it is not going to cause that much of an impact.