This topic describes the release notes for Alibaba Cloud CDN and the corresponding documentation.
2025
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
serve stale content | The serve stale content feature is a key fault tolerance measure. If an origin server becomes unavailable or returns an error (such as a 4xx/5xx status code or timeout), CDN serves expired content from its cache. This improves website availability during origin server failures. | September 2025 | All | |
specify origin SNI | When an accelerated domain name uses multiple origin servers over HTTPS, each with a different web domain, you can specify a unique SNI for each. This ensures CDN can establish successful SSL connections with each origin server. | September 2025 | All | |
client authentication certificate | This feature allows the server to verify a client's identity by using a custom CA certificate, which enables mutual authentication and enhances communication security. | September 2025 | All | |
usage cap | The new usage cap feature replaces the previous bandwidth cap. It includes three modes: bandwidth cap, traffic cap, and HTTPS request cap. When a cap is triggered, CDN automatically takes the accelerated domain name offline and resumes service at a preset time. This helps mitigate costs from sudden traffic bursts. | July 2025 | All | |
cache TTL | This feature is enhanced with four new parameters for more granular control over cache policies:
| June 2025 | All | |
status code TTL | This feature is enhanced with four new parameters for more granular control over cache policies:
| June 2025 | All | |
custom cache key |
| June 2025 | All | |
range origin fetch |
| June 2025 | All | |
specify origin Host | This feature is now integrated with the rules engine, allowing you to filter user requests for more flexible origin Host configurations. | June 2025 | All | |
remote authentication | You can now set multiple status codes for both successful and failed authentications. | February 2025 | All |
2024
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
URL signing | Adds support for Type F signing. | 2024-07 | All | |
CacheTag refresh | When a resource from an origin server includes a CacheTag header, CDN uses the tag to refresh the cache. This enables you to refresh similar content in batches. | 2024-03 | All |
2023
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
Single-request rate limit | The single-request rate limit feature limits the download speed for requests to CDN nodes. This helps you reduce peak bandwidth for an accelerated domain name, which is useful for scenarios like new game version releases and software downloads. | November 2023 | All | |
Self-service diagnostic tool | If you encounter issues like a webpage failing to load or displaying errors when using CDN, use the self-service diagnostic tool to identify the cause. The tool generates a diagnostic report that helps you determine whether to adjust your CDN settings or submit a ticket for assistance. | October 2023 | All | |
Shared cache | Within the same account, accelerated domain names can share cached resources on CDN nodes in a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship. This feature improves the resource hit rate, enhances CDN performance, and reduces origin fetch traffic. | September 2023 | All | |
| These features are now integrated with the rules engine. This lets you filter user requests by specific conditions, enabling more flexible policy configurations. | August 2023 | All | |
| These features are now integrated with the rules engine. This lets you filter user requests by specific conditions, enabling more flexible policy configurations. | July 2023 | All | |
Conditional origin | The conditional origin feature integrates with the rules engine to filter user requests based on specific conditions (for example, request header, query string parameter, path, and client ip). The feature then fetches requests that match these conditions from a specified origin. You can configure multiple rules to fetch requests from different origins based on varying conditions. | February 2023 | All | |
Rules engine | The rules engine provides a graphical interface to configure conditional rules. These rules analyze request parameters to determine how to apply your configurations, giving you more flexible and precise control over your CDN policies. This initial release supports integration with the conditional origin feature. | February 2023 | All | |
Cross-account CDN domain migration | To migrate a CDN accelerated domain name to another account, use the self-service migration tool. | January 2023 | All | |
Specify an origin HOST | If your accelerated domain name uses multiple origins, you can set a specific origin HOST for each. During an origin fetch, a CDN node sends the corresponding origin HOST header. This specified HOST takes priority over the default origin HOST. | January 2023 | All | |
Origin fetch from a private Alibaba Cloud OSS bucket | In addition to fetching resources from private OSS buckets within the same account, CDN now supports configuring an accelerated domain name to fetch resources from a private OSS bucket that belongs to another Alibaba Cloud account. | January 2023 | All |
2022
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
origin fetch over IPv6 | You can configure origin fetch over IPv6 to allow CDN points of presence (POPs) to access your origin server using the IPv6 protocol. You can also set different origin fetch policies. | November 2022 | All | |
web frontend performance | Web frontend performance is a joint feature from Alibaba Cloud CDN and Application Real-time Monitoring Service (ARMS). By embedding a monitoring script in your web pages, it monitors real-time user access data to help you understand your website's performance, such as page load speed, page stability (JS errors), and the success rate of external API calls. | September 2022 | All | |
common name whitelist | After enabling the common name whitelist, CDN POPs verify the Server Name Indication (SNI) in the request and the common name in the origin server's certificate when establishing an HTTPS connection. | July 2022 | All | |
configure TTL for status codes (honor origin) | You can configure the time-to-live (TTL) for status codes on the Alibaba Cloud CDN console. This enables a POP to respond directly with a cached status code for subsequent requests, reducing origin fetch traffic and the load on your origin server. To prioritize the TTL policy set on your origin server, you can enable the configure TTL for status codes (honor origin) feature. | July 2022 | All | |
regular expression refresh | You can refresh URLs by submitting a regular expression. Alibaba Cloud CDN then refreshes all matching URLs in a batch, which enables more targeted content refreshing. | July 2022 | All | |
Upgraded console UI | The user interface for the CDN console is completely redesigned, including the Overview page, left-side navigation pane, and Resource Plans page. The upgrade improves usability with clearer workflows and more functional tooltips. | June 2022 | All | None |
Terraform integration | Terraform is an open-source, infrastructure-as-code tool for safely and efficiently provisioning and managing cloud resources. Alibaba Cloud CDN is now fully integrated with Terraform. | May 2022 | All | Use Terraform to add and configure CDN and DCDN domain names |
application center | The application center provides quick access to Alibaba Cloud CDN tools and value-added services, such as IP query, making it easy to find and enable them. | March 2022 | All | |
Tag management | The tag management user experience is fully upgraded with a more intuitive interface. | February 2022 | All | |
QUIC | When QUIC is enabled, data is transmitted between clients and CDN POPs over QUIC. This enhances transmission performance while ensuring data security. | January 2022 | All |
2021
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
Statistical analytics | The statistical analytics feature is discontinued. You can use the operations report feature instead. | November 2021 | All | |
Domain name management | The domain name management feature now supports advanced search by origin server or accelerated domain name. Searches for accelerated domain names support fuzzy, exact, prefix, and suffix matching. | / | ||
Content moderation for images | The content moderation for images feature is discontinued. | October 2021 | All | / |
Operations report | The operations report feature lets you query offline analysis data for accelerated domain names over various time periods to help you analyze your business. | September 2021 | All | |
CORS | To share or access resources across origins, configure custom HTTP response headers. | July 2021 | All | |
Custom cache key | You can use a custom cache key to group similar requests for the same file. This improves the cache hit rate and reduces origin fetch traffic. | All | ||
302 redirection | When you enable 302 redirection, CDN nodes automatically follow redirects from your origin server. This simplifies the request process and helps users get content faster. | All | ||
Updated workflow for adding accelerated domain names | The console now provides a guided setup with recommended configurations to simplify adding an accelerated domain name. | All | ||
Log storage | You can enable log storage to automatically deliver CDN logs to your Object Storage Service (OSS) bucket for long-term storage, management, and analysis. | June 2021 | All | |
Origin server weights | Assign different weights to multiple origin servers. CDN then routes origin fetch requests by weighted round-robin. | April 2021 | All | |
EdgeScript templates and monitoring | The CDN console now provides EdgeScript templates to help you quickly deploy common business scenarios. You can customize configurations by modifying a few parameters, improving programming efficiency. Additionally, you can now monitor edge script runtime and exceptions. You can query the execution status and error codes for each edge script to enhance observability. | March 2021 | All | |
Remote authentication | Remote authentication is a secondary authentication workflow that involves the client, CDN, and your authentication server. You can configure custom authentication rules in the console. | All | ||
Pay by peak bandwidth | As of January 8, 2021, CDN defaults to the pay by data transfer metering method. To use the pay by peak bandwidth method, contact your Alibaba Cloud account manager or submit a ticket. | January 2021 | All |
2020
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
Integration with Anti-DDoS | Alibaba Cloud CDN POPs integrate with Anti-DDoS to scrub network traffic, combining content acceleration with security. | June 2020 | All regions | |
Image editing | Enables on-the-fly image editing on POPs, including resizing, cropping, sharpening, rotating, and format conversion. | June 2020 | All regions | |
Custom HTTP response header enhancement | The custom HTTP response header feature is enhanced, now allowing you to add, delete, modify, and replace headers. | May 2020 | All regions | |
External link rewrite to resolve the IPv6 partial loading issue | When a webpage links to an external site that does not support IPv6, users might experience slow loading or content failures, even with dual-stack technology. Alibaba Cloud CDN resolves this by rewriting external links at the POP and applying IPv6 acceleration to the linked content. | May 2020 | All regions | |
Origin parameter rewrite | Allows you to rewrite URL parameters in requests sent to the origin. | April 2020 | All regions | |
Origin path rewrite | Allows you to rewrite the path in requests sent to the origin. | April 2020 | All regions | |
Modify incoming response headers | Allows you to modify HTTP headers in responses from the origin server. | April 2020 | All regions | |
Modify outgoing request headers (New) | Allows you to modify HTTP headers in requests sent to the origin server. | April 2020 | All regions | |
EdgeRoutine | Allows you to deploy your JavaScript code to global POPs. | March 2020 | All regions |
2019
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
IPv6 | After you enable IPv6, clients can access CDN over IPv6. CDN then includes the client's IPv6 address in requests to your origin server. | October 2019 | All | |
Audio and video preview | Lets you offer trial experiences for audio and video content, such as previews for non-subscribers. | All | ||
Audio extraction | When enabled, CDN extracts the audio from a video file and serves it to the client, saving bandwidth. | September 2019 | All | |
EdgeScript | EdgeScript is a programming toolkit for creating custom CDN and DCDN configurations. Use it to implement custom logic at the edge when the standard console settings are insufficient. | July 2019 | All | |
Rewrite | You can configure URI rewrite rules in the console to customize how CDN processes requests. | July 2019 | All | |
Brotli compression | Brotli is a modern open-source compression algorithm that improves download performance by 15% to 25% compared to Gzip. | May 2019 | All | |
User-agent blacklists and whitelists | This feature lets you control access based on a request's user-agent header. You can configure blacklists or whitelists to filter traffic and block malicious requests. | All | ||
Change acceleration region | You can change the acceleration region for a domain name in the console to adjust its content delivery scope. | April 2019 | All | |
Upgraded certificate center | The certificate center lets you deploy an SSL certificate to multiple domain names at once. | March 2019 | All | |
SNI | CDN supports Server Name Indication (SNI) for origin fetch. This lets CDN specify the hostname during the TLS handshake, ensuring the origin server returns the correct SSL certificate for multi-domain hosting environments. | All |
2018
Parameter | Description | Release date | Region | Documentation |
TLS version and HSTS |
| 2018-11 | All | |
New API release | The previous version of the API is now deprecated. We recommend that you migrate to the new version. | 2018-09 | All | |
New console release | The CDN console lets you perform basic operations, such as configuring domain names. It also provides resource monitoring with real-time data analytics. You can view billing information and change the billing method at any time. | 2018-07 | All |
2017
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
DCDN | DCDN is a content delivery service built on Alibaba Cloud CDN. It accelerates the delivery of dynamic or mixed dynamic and static content for applications and origin servers. | August 2017 | All regions |
2016
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
CDN pre-paid data transfer plan | A pre-paid data transfer plan activates upon a one-time payment. Data transfer exceeding the plan's quota is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis. | February 2016 | All regions |
2015
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
Custom cache rules and priorities | Lets you configure cache rules for resources by directory and file extension, customize cache expiration times, and set rule priorities. | October 2015 | All regions | |
Custom HTTP response headers | Define custom values for 10 HTTP response header parameters. | August 2015 | All regions |
2014
Feature | Description | Release date | Region | References |
Official launch of Alibaba Cloud CDN | Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a distributed network of points of presence (POPs) that reduces load on the origin server, prevents network congestion, and accelerates content delivery for faster access across regions. | March 2014 | All regions |