Azure CDN announced by Microsoft

On May 7th 2018 Microsoft released a preview version of their own CDN under the name "Azure CDN".
It will join Akamai and Verizon(Edgecast) in Azure, their cloud platform. Interestingly its the only cloud provider that resells third-party CDN services.
Their direct competitors Google and Amazon both offer CDN services exclusively built on their own infrastructure.

Azure CDN Control Panel Overview

When creating a new CDN endpoint Azure allows you to select what CDN provider you want to use. Their new CDN is listed under "S3 Standard Microsoft".
At the moment they offer a 50% discount but later it will probably be priced at $0.073, the same as the rest of the options.

When creating an endpoint you can select different origin types such as "Storage", "Cloud service", "Web app", "Custom origin". This allows you to easily integrate their CDN with their other cloud products.

For "Custom origin" you can select any hostname or IP that you control to proxy-cache the contents and serve through their CDN.

Once you create your CDN endpoint you get some standard configuration options

Unfortunately, the features can't be compared to any other popular CDN providers such as Cloudflare, Fastly or Cloudfront. All options are very basic and barebones.

Azure CDN Performance

All data is based on millions of benchmarks from real users all around the world.

Immediately after the announcement we added Azure CDN to PerfOps and made all data available for free on CDNPerf as well.

In total Azure CDN is the 6th fastest CDN in the world.

It shows great performance in Europe, North America and most interestingly Oceania and South America, where many CDN providers struggle with peering and end up with bad routing impacting their performance. Potential customers that have a large user-base in countries such as Brazil, Australia and New Zealand should consider Azure CDN for their needs.

A manual traceroute from South America also confirms the findings. Only 5ms to reach Microsoft's datacenter and the packet never leaves the country, it goes straight from the IX to Miscrosoft's network.

Azure Summary

In total the new Azure CDN looks like a good value offering good performance at an affordable pricing. Unfortunately its very limited feature-wise but I am sure its still a great fit for many companies that are only looking for reliable and fast file delivery.