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Alibaba Cloud CDN (CDN) provides widely distributed nodes and allows you to deliver content, such as websites, audio, and videos. CDN allows users to download files from the nodes nearest to them, accelerating the response to user requests and increasing the success rate. CDN also resolves the delivery latency problem usually caused by distribution, bandwidth, and server performance issues.
CDN supports large file delivery, hybrid acceleration of dynamic and static content delivery, data transmission using non-standard protocols, programmable computing, and end-to-end IPv6. A wide range of CDN solutions developed based on practical experience are available for various business scenarios, such as application store downloads, e-commerce promotions, online education, financial security, social communication, game acceleration, and multimedia streaming.
Common Scenarios
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Cost-Effectiveness: Generates fewer costs on downlink bandwidth than dedicated bandwidth. This effectively offloads bandwidth pressure on origin servers.
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High-Performance: Adopts the distributed system architecture and provides high-performance Alibaba Cloud caching software to achieve high stability and efficiency.
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Efficient Scheduling: Supports real-time monitoring of full data based on domain names and intelligent scheduling based on services.
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Reduced Back-to-Origin Costs: Works with Object Storage Service (OSS) to reduce up to 66.7% of back-to-origin costs.
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High Performance: Adopts the distributed system architecture and provides high-performance Alibaba Cloud caching software to achieve high stability and efficiency.
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Efficient Scheduling: Supports real-time monitoring of full data based on domain names and intelligent scheduling based on services.
Related Services:
Provides scalable virtual cloud servers that are ready-to-deploy.
Provides ApsaraDB RDS for MySQL databases with high stability and high performance.
Provides encrypted and secure cloud storage services that are ready for use on demand.
Distributes incoming application traffic across multiple zones.
Allows managed applications to use key-value databases as in-memory caches.
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Efficient, Automatic, and Professional Media Processing: Supports user-defined audio and video processing workflows, including the visualized configuration of transcoding, snapshots, and watermarks.
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Access Control and Copyright Protection: Allows you to configure HTTP Referrer blacklist and whitelist and advanced URL signing to prevent leeches.
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Smooth Playback without Stuttering: Provides high stability and high performance with a cache hit ratio higher than 95% and a response time within milliseconds.
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High Availability: Works with Auto Scaling to adjust the server bandwidth and handle burst traffic quickly.
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Scalability: Works with ApsaraVideo Media Processing (MPS) to achieve high-speed, stable, and parallel transcoding. This allows you to run multiple transcoding tasks seamlessly.
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Fast Video Decoding: Caches groups of pictures (GOPs) of frames on CDN edge nodes. This allows mobile playback clients to buffer the content quickly.
Related Services:
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Anti-Hijacking: Works with HTTPDNS to implement intelligent and precise routing. This allows users to access nearby resources quickly.
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Multi-Platform Adaptation: Provides SDKs for iOS and Android, deeply optimizes multiple protocols, and supports connection multiplexing and header compression.
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Dynamic and Static Acceleration: Supports the acceleration of static and dynamic content and efficient caching of static content.
Benefits
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Extensive Node Coverage
CDN has more than 2,800 globally distributed nodes. Among these nodes, more than 2,300 are distributed across 31 provincial regions in Mainland China. More than 500 are distributed across over 70 countries and regions, including Hong Kong (China), Macao (China), and Taiwan (China).
CDN supports a total bandwidth capacity of up to 150 Tbit/s and 10 GE network interface controllers (NICs). Each node provides 40 TB to 1.5 PB of data storage and a bandwidth capacity of 40 Gbit/s to 200 Gbit/s.
Please click here for more information about CDN node distribution. -
Precise Scheduling
CDN has adopted various measures to improve its scheduling precision, including the continuous update of IP address precision for databases, delivery of HTTPDNS services, content-based scheduling to improve access hit ratio, and node health-based automatic scheduling.
CDN provides a precise scheduling system that can make offline scheduling plans based on historical traffic trends and schedules traffic based on traffic bursts in real-time. This way, CDN can monitor the health status of each edge node in real-time and allocate nodes for service access in an optimally. -
Cost-Effectiveness
CDN offers competitive prices and allows you to flexibly customize the items to purchase. You can use the pay-as-you-go billing method and purchase resource plans based on your business requirements. If your resources are stored in Object Storage Service (OSS) buckets outside Mainland China, you can use CDN to accelerate the delivery of the resources from these buckets to edge nodes outside Mainland China for free. If your bandwidth usage exceeds 20 TB per month, you can contact Alibaba Cloud to make a minimum traffic commitment and get additional discounts.
Please see CDN Pricing and CDN Calculator for more information. -
High-Performance Transmission Protocols
Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) is a new transport layer network protocol that inherited qualities from TCP, TLS, and HTTP/2. QUIC supports encrypted, low-latency, and multiplexed connections. These qualities can meet the requirements for the transport and application layers.
Independently Developed Algorithms for the TCP Protocol Suite: Alibaba Cloud has developed algorithms to improve the performance of TCP, such as congestion detection and packet loss probing algorithms. The transmission performance has been improved significantly. -
Sound Security Protection
CDN provides security protection capabilities. You can also use Secure CDN (SCDN) with CDN to protect resource security better. This solution can accelerate content delivery, prevent tenant IP addresses from risks, and protect resources against DNS attacks and HTTP flood attacks.
CDN supports primary and secondary origin servers and can monitor the health status of the origin servers. If the primary origin server fails, requests are redirected to a secondary origin server. -
Configuration Customization
CDN allows you to use EdgeScript (ES) to customize configurations. If the standard configurations in the CDN console cannot meet your requirements, you can use ES to customize configurations and tailor your services for long-term commitment and various business requirements.
ES applies to scenarios where you want to rewrite and redirect requests, block requests, run A/B tests, perform throttling, and customize authentication logic, request and response headers, and caching policies.
Features
HTTPS Secure Acceleration
Provides a reliable enterprise-level acceleration service over HTTPS to prevent hijacking, tampering, and leakage.
End-to-End Content Delivery Acceleration
Uses HTTPS to secure client access, node interconnectivity, and origin fetch requests. You only need to enable secured acceleration and upload the domain certificate or private key to achieve secured acceleration. You can also view, enable, disable, and modify domain certificates.
Forced HTTPS Redirection
Redirects HTTP requests from clients to edge nodes as HTTPS requests if HTTPS secure acceleration is enabled.
High-Performance and Flexible Cache Policy
Supports intelligent popularity calculation and hierarchical caching of frequently requested resources on edge nodes to accelerate content delivery precisely.
High-Performance Caching
Supports load balancing among multiple vCPUs, efficient memory usage and management, and maximized IOPS and SSD storage throughput.
Ultra-High Read and Write Performance
All nodes are configured with SSDs to support high-speed reading and writing to reduce response time and improve node availability significantly.
User-Defined Cache Expiration Time
Allows you to customize cache expiration rules for cached resources based on the directory where the resources reside or the file extensions in the resource names.
Request Header Customization
Provides multiple parameters for customizing the HTTP request headers.
Access Control
Provides a variety of hotlink protection features based on Referrer headers, user agent headers, IP addresses, URL signing, and remote authentication to prevent leeches efficiently.
Referrer-Based Hotlink Protection
Uses Referrer whitelists and blacklists to identify and filter users for access control.
Authentication Configuration
Supports advanced hotlink protection. This allows you to configure cryptographic keys to encrypt URLs and protect user resources on origin servers.
IP Address Blacklist
Blocks the IP addresses in the blacklist from accessing accelerated domains.
Performance Optimization
Supports web page optimization and smart compression to reduce the overheads in content delivery and accelerate the delivery.
Web Page Optimization
Removes redundant content on web pages, such as comments and redundant spaces on HTML pages and in JavaScript and CSS scripts.
Smart Compression
Compresses static files to efficiently reduce the size of content to be delivered.
Parameter Filtering
Removes parameters following the question mark (?) in URLs to increase the cache hit ratio and improve content delivery efficiency.
Statistical Analytics and Log Management
Statistical Analytics
Provides a customized log service and storage persistence service for the ease of log downloading and analysis.
Log Management
Provides a customized log service and storage persistence service for the ease of log downloading and analysis.
Customer Stories
CDN Industry Applications
Online Education Solution
Power learning experience by leading content hosting and delivery networks and large-scale distributed real-time transcoding technology
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Livestreaming for E-Commerce
Engage shoppers via a live shopping platform across social media, apps, and websites with high definition and low latency livestreaming capabilities
Learn More
Gaming Solutions
Empower your business with agile game development, secure and fast global distribution and cost-effective operations.
Sports Live+ Solution
Apply Narrowband HD transcoding and video enhancement capabilities to achieve video graphic packaging, retransmission push flow, content management
Learn More
