Alibaba Cloud CDN supports a wide range of use cases, including accelerating the delivery of small files, large file downloads, and video-on-demand services.
Overview
The following table lists common Alibaba Cloud CDN scenarios.
Scenario | Description |
Accelerates delivery of small files for websites and applications, such as portals, e-commerce sites, news and information platforms, and entertainment or gaming sites. | |
Accelerates downloads and distribution of large files, such as game installers, app updates, mobile ROM upgrades, and application packages. Individual files typically exceed 20 MB. | |
Accelerates file delivery and access for audio and video websites, such as movie and TV platforms, online education sites, news video sites, short-video social platforms, and audio-focused websites and apps. Supports primary video formats such as MP4 and FLV. |
The business type primarily affects CDN scheduling and optimization strategies. For example, the large file download scenario enables optimizations such as shard-based origin fetch and preloading. If you select a business type that does not exactly match your actual workload, acceleration is not disabled. CDN will still deliver and cache content as normal. However, to achieve optimal acceleration performance, choose the business type that best matches your file sizes and workload characteristics.
Small image files
This scenario is ideal for accelerating the delivery of small files for websites and applications, such as portals, e-commerce sites, news and information platforms, and entertainment or gaming sites. We recommend that you separate static and dynamic content at your origin. Use Alibaba Cloud CDN to accelerate static content, such as images, CSS, and JavaScript files. Use Alibaba Cloud Edge Security Acceleration (ESA) for dynamic content.
Static content refers to files that return identical data across different requests, such as images, videos, static website assets (HTML, CSS, JS), software installation packages, APK files, and compressed archives.
Dynamic content refers to data that differs between requests, such as server-side scripts (ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl, CGI), API endpoints, and database interaction requests.
CDN acceleration for small files such as images helps resolve the following issues:
Slow end user access: Websites load slowly because of numerous small files.
Poor cross-region access quality: End users in different regions experience inconsistent access speeds and quality.
High concurrency pressure: During promotions, origin servers face heavy loads and may crash, which causes service outages.
Complex image format and resolution handling: You cannot compress and optimize images based on the characteristics of end user devices.
Large file downloads
This scenario applies to accelerating downloads and the distribution of large files, such as game installers, app updates, mobile ROM upgrades, and application packages. Individual files are typically larger than 20 MB.
CDN acceleration for large file downloads helps resolve the following issues:
End users cannot download files or experience extremely slow downloads.
Unstable network conditions cause frequent download interruptions and failures.
Content security risks: Files are vulnerable to hijacking or hotlinking, which can lead to business losses.
High concurrency or sudden download spikes place extreme demands on origin server performance and incur high bandwidth costs.
Video-on-demand
The video-on-demand scenario applies to audio and video websites, such as movie and TV platforms, online education sites, news video sites, short-video social platforms, and audio-focused websites and apps. You can use Alibaba Cloud CDN to accelerate file delivery and access for audio and video content.
CDN acceleration for video-on-demand helps resolve the following issues:
End users cannot open videos or experience frequent stuttering, which results in a poor viewing experience.
Video resources are vulnerable to hijacking or unauthorized use, which compromises copyright protection.
High concurrency or sudden traffic spikes place extreme demands on origin server performance and incur high bandwidth costs.
If you want an all-in-one service that can upload, transcode, store, and distribute audio or video content, you can use ApsaraVideo VOD. ApsaraVideo VOD integrates audio and video uploading, automated transcoding, media resource management, and content delivery acceleration into a complete solution. For more information about ApsaraVideo VOD, see What is ApsaraVideo VOD.