Alibaba Cloud CDN

Deliver online content to end-users anywhere in the world on Alibaba Cloud CDN (Content Delivery Network). With 530 nodes distributed across the globe, Alibaba Cloud CDN enables users to effectively reduce website response time to milliseconds, ensure smooth video streaming and handle large volumes of traffic.

As a low-cost and scalable service, Alibaba Cloud CDN comes without any long-term contracts or minimum usage commitments.

Expand your online presence with Alibaba Cloud CDN in the China region. Alibaba Cloud's 500 CDN nodes in China provide unsurpassed coverage for servicing the vast China market. In order to deploy a website on a CDN in Mainland China you will need to first apply for an ICP License. Alibaba Cloud has a dedicated team of bilingual experts to help guide you through the ICP License application process.

"We needed a local CDN service to speed up our assets and user sites, and we tried all major CDN providers in China. According to my benchmark results, Alibaba Cloud wins on the number of edge servers, average response time, average download speed in all major ISPs and provinces. It also has developer-friendly API for us to automate our solution."

"The Alibaba Cloud CDN service provides comprehensive support for Alipay financial services. The encrypted HTTPS access improves the Alipay user experience and effectively ensures the security of users' personal and sensitive banking information."

• Using simple custom configuration options, Alibaba Cloud CDN allows you to add, delete, modify and search query domain names on your own.

• Supports customizing anti-leech measures, cache policies, HTTP request headers, and other functions.

• Provides flexible features like auto scaling.

• Website traffic spikes are handled automatically.

• Reduces load on origin site.

• Alibaba Cloud CDN has 500 CDN nodes located in China and more than 30 CDN nodes around the globe.

• Pay only for what resources you use.

• No long-term contract or minimum usage commitment.

• Follows a “use-first, pay-later” model.

• Provides different billing options such as “Pay-By-Traffic" or "Pay-By-Bandwidth" to suit different business requirements.

• Supports a massive storage capacity of up to 1.5PB.

• Enables website response time in milliseconds.

• Ensures smooth video streaming.

The Alibaba Cloud CDN is built to automatically handle spikes in traffic, reduce load speed on your origin site and support storage capacity of up to 1.5 petabytes.

With its low latency and high data transfer rate, the Alibaba Cloud CDN directs user requests to the most suitable node based on network congestion to retrieve content in the most efficient manner. The CDN has a high performance cache system built with powerful clusters of servers to maximize throughput. The CDN relies on an intelligent object heat algorithm and hierarchical ‘hot’ cache resources for precise resource acceleration.

• Reduces complexity by supporting millions of domain names with a single machine.

• Ensures high availability with multi-level scheduling policies.

• Simple and easy to use. Coordinates security systems, refresh systems and content management systems using multi-system interaction techniques.

• Enhances user experience with real-time data scheduling option and advanced traffic predictions.

• High-speed audio and video downloads using acceleration feature for on-demand and live streaming media.

• Quick and easy integrated solution which includes media storage, slicing and transcoding and access authentication.

• Smooth playback experience delivered through on-demand audio and video incremental service.

• Easy deployment with support for MP4 and FLV video formats.

• Enhanced security of media resources with resource link authentication and custom authentication keys.

You can seamlessly integrate Alibaba Cloud CDN service with other services to improve data transfer speed and easy content distribution. Below are the benefits of using CDN service with other Alibaba Cloud services:

• Works seamlessly with Object Storage Services (OSS) to accelerate speed and reduce cost for content distribution.

• Effectively works with Elastic Compute Service (ECS) to increase content availability, protect original content and reduce bandwidth consumption.

• Works efficiently with Server Load Balancer (SLB) to distribute load when origin site goes to source address to access data.

The console is user friendly and allows smart deployment of CDN servers or nodes with custom configurations. You can use the console to achieve the following:

• Add, delete, modify or send query for domain names.

• Set policies for acceleration of cache nodes.

• Deploy anti-leeching features.

• Update “http” header information according to your business requirements.

• Deploy acceleration and optimization functions.

• CDN API works well with the Management Console to provide flexible and convenient CDN services to users.

• CDN API enables precise deployment and accurate monitoring of CDN domains and distribution of resources.

• CDN API can be programmatically used with other Alibaba Cloud products to build customized portals.

• CDN service provides full network monitoring with rich data analysis and resource report.

• CDN service provides in-depth monitoring information including data on bandwidth usage, traffic patterns, popularity analysis, and security reports.

The price structure for Alibaba Cloud CDN consists of basic services and value-added services.

Basic services consists of Pay-By-Traffic and Pay-By-Bandwidth. Value-added services consist of HTTPS Secure Acceleration and Pre-paid Traffic Package.

Users may flexibly switch between the Pay-By-Bandwidth and Pay-By-Traffic billing methods. The new billing method will take effect from the subsequent billing cycle.

Billing item: Downstream traffic

Billing item: Peak bandwidth

Price of HTTPS secure acceleration refers to Basic fee (charged for downstream traffic OR peak bandwidth per day) + Fee charged for HTTPS requests

1.Value-added service price

2.Billing rules

• Billing item: HTTPS requests

• Method of payment: Post payment

• Billing rule: Billing is based on the HTTPS request price for value-added services. HTTPS requests are accumulated on a calendar day basis.

• Billing cycle: Billed by the day; fee deducted in real time (The bill for the previous day is issued and the fee deducted after 00:00 each day.)

Note:

• A bill is typically issued within one hour of the end of the current billing cycle. For example, the bill for June 17 will be generated after 0:00 June 18. The amount due is then automatically deducted from your account balance.

• Billing of HTTPS requests: Settlement is based on the cumulative HTTPS requests generated by all domains for which secure acceleration is activated on the current day.

Traffic package sizes from 500G - 50TB are available for 1 year.

The packages are pre-paid in Subscription mode (paid in one total sum and activated immediately). The traffic beyond the package quota is billed in Pay-As-You-Go mode.

For the duration of the resource package, fees are deducted for your use of the traffic quota. For traffic outside the quota, fees are billed based on the existing billing rules.

Billing rules

• Billing items: domestic traffic+international traffic

• Method of payment: Prepayment

• Billing cycle: Billed by the hour and charged in real time (a bill is generated every hour and the used traffic is deducted from the traffic package).

Notice for use:

• You can buy a pre-paid traffic package with a credit card.

• Traffic packages only support the Pay-As-You-Go billing mode. If the billing mode of your traffic package is PayByBandwidth, the balance of your traffic package will be frozen until you switch to Pay-As-You-Go.

• CDN traffic packages (global) allow you to deduct the traffic generated by domestic and international nodes.

• Traffic packages are limited to your own account only.

• Traffic packages are prioritized and used based on expiration time. Traffic is deducted first from the traffic package that will expire soonest.

• To view the balance of your traffic package, go to Resource Package Management.

• Your traffic package is only valid during the specified validity period. Any unused traffic will expire when the traffic package expires, and Alibaba Cloud will not provide replacements or complements.

• Accelerate the distribution of resources for websites or applications that have a large volume of static resources with a Content Delivery Network. We recommend you separate the dynamic and static content as below:

• Store large volume of static resources such as images, HTML, CSS, and JS files using Object Storage Service (OSS). OSS accelerates the delivery of images, short videos and other content.

• Store dynamic files on Elastic Compute Service (ECS).

• CDN supports fast download and distribution of various media files such as mp4, flv, mpeg.

• CDN supports acceleration of on-demand streaming services for large file sizes, greater than 20MB such as mp4 and flv videos.

You can use Alibaba Cloud CDN for efficient and secure distribution of mobile applications (APK files). You can take advantage of CDN to achieve the following:

• Accelerate and optimize distribution of in-app images, pages, short videos, UGC and other content.

• Prevent DNS attacks using the http DNS service.

• Retrieve DNS resolution in real time.

• Enhance user experience with quick access to resources.

You can improve the performance of your website, media or mobile applications and deliver high-speed content to end users by using the following developer resources for Alibaba Cloud CDN.

The Alibaba Cloud Management Console provides a simple web-based user interface which allows you to access and configure CDN. Through this console you can create, modify and monitor CDN distributions.

Read the Quick Start Guide for a step-by-step direction to deploy a CDN through the Management Console.

To accelerate content distribution through the Alibaba Cloud CDN, read the CDN Documentation to get a detailed understanding about the underlying architectures, how Alibaba Cloud CDN works and how to monitor distributions.

Alibaba Cloud CDN resources will help you understand and use the CDN service to deliver accelerated distribution of files and media content by caching blobs and other static content. These resources will help you understand how CDN works.

Below are the links to the documentation, SDKs and other resources.

Alibaba Cloud CDN developer resources are a collection of documents which contain all the information you need to set up a CDN for your website. Links here would help you to integrate CDN with ECS and OSS for better content delivery.

CDN is used to speed up files or content delivery on the cloud. When an access request is received, a CDN node passively retrieves the requested content from the origin site, caches a copy of the retrieved content and returns it to the user instantly. Depending on the location of the access request, the CDN node returns the cached content during subsequent requests instead of fetching it from the origin server to accelerate delivery.

A mirror site stores all data locally. So when an access request is made again, the mirror site directly pushes the requested content without going back to the origin server.

The edge nodes of CDN are distributed in multiple areas and maintained by different carriers, and not deployed only on BGP networks. The cache layer is located on the BGP network in Hangzhou. It retrieves resources from the origin site server.

No, Content Delivery Network is not updated in real time.

When a request is made for the first time, it may take longer than subsequent requests. This is because the request travels through two network layers, the CDN edge layer and intermediate layer, to retrieve data from the origin site.

You do not have to modify the origin site to use CDN. However, it is recommended to store static and dynamic resources separately to accelerate content distribution. This can be achieved by putting files in different domains.

Content Delivery Network statistics are comprehensive as data is collected based on every logged access request. If a page contains multiple iframe tags, CDN counts those as multiple page views.

You can get deeper insights into the data by using third party tools compatible with Alibaba Cloud CDN service such as CNZZ and Google Analytics.

Alibaba Cloud CDN has an intelligent scheduling system and cache software—both of which work in tandem to accelerate content distribution.

Alibaba Cloud CDN accelerates the resources under a domain name. For example, if you have the domain xyz.com which maps to a web application containing media content, CDN would cache these files. Next time a request is made for the same file, CDN would retrieve it quickly as it is saved locally. You can set caching parameters for different files as per the requirement through the Management Console.

TTL in Alibaba Cloud CDN is the duration of the cached objects/files. You can customize the TTLs for various objects like JavaScript, Images, and CSS according to your needs. For example, you can set a TTL of 60 seconds for a JavaScript file.

There is no limit on the bandwidth of nodes and the minimum service capacity of a single node is 20Gbps.

The Alibaba Cloud Content Delivery Network domain acceleration becomes effective within 30 minutes after the domain name is verified.

If the file loading rate is low or access error occurs after CDN acceleration, use the nslookup command and ping the CDN domain to obtain the IP address of the CDN node accessed by the user. You can then do basic troubleshooting and seek information to know the rate of delay and packet loss.

“A record” stands for address and is used to specify an IP address corresponding to a host name (or a domain name).

A CNAME record—a canonical name record—is used to map multiple names to the same CDN server. Generally, it is used on computers that provide both www and mail services.

Yes the Alibaba Cloud accelerates gaming apps. Companies dealing with development of online Android, PC or IOS games can use this for accelerated delivery of content and files.

Yes, Alibaba Cloud CDN’s intelligent scheduling system checks all the ports mapped to the virtual IP address of each node to determine the health status. In case the health check fails, access requests will be diverted to a nearby node.

• Change the CNAME of your domain to the address of your A record

• Direct the CNAME to your origin site

• Stop the CDN service through the CDN console.

You can test CDN performance at www.alibench.com

Alibaba Cloud CDN can compress files stored on CDN nodes.

For file compression, content must meet the following requirements:

• The content retrieved from the origin site should be greater than 1,024 bytes.

• The files to be compressed must be in the following formats: content-type: text/xml, text/plain, text/css, application/javascript, application/x-javascript, application/rss+xml, text/javascript, image/tiff, and image/svg+xml.

You should execute page compression using the CDN console. All browsers are compatible except Internet Explorer 6.

To update a cached file, you should synchronize the content at origin site by version number. However same name updates are not recommended.

If you need to update files with the same name, submit refresh requests through the CDN console or APIs. You can submit up to 1,000 refresh requests for the same domain every day. Directory level refresh is also supported.

A small traffic fee is charged even after the CDN service is discontinued for the following reasons:

• The local DNS server has a cache and if the cache has not expired, the DNS will continue to direct requests to the CDN node. This will produce a small CDN traffic fee.

• Some software that can be downloaded also has local DNS caches. A suspended CDN domain may produce a small CDN traffic fee until the cache expires.