How can a content delivery network be useful to a small business?

To proactively detect latency spikes on Azure Front Door (AFD) before customers notice, SREs should monitor a comprehensive dashboard in Azure Monitor that focuses on both edge and backend performance. The dashboard should combine AFD metrics with Application Insights and network health data to differentiate between problems with the AFD platform, backend services, or the broader internet.

• AFD metrics dashboard

This dashboard uses platform metrics collected by Azure Monitor to give a real-time view of AFD's performance. 

• Application performance dashboard

This dashboard uses Application Insights to provide an end-to-end view of your application, validating if the issue is with your backend services rather than AFD.

• Network and multi-region dashboard

Since AFD performance is tied to its global network, monitoring broader network health is crucial.

• Automation for proactive alerts

To catch latency spikes before customers do, configure Azure Monitor alerts on these dashboard metrics.

In light of recent, complex outages like the Cloudflare-AWS congestion and Azure Front Door (AFD) platform configuration errors, disaster recovery (DR) testing for AFD must move beyond simple backend failures. Your tests should now simulate broader network degradations and AFD platform-level issues to validate your full resilience strategy. 

• 1. Test backend failover under duress
• 2. Simulate AFD platform-level failure
• 3. Verify end-to-end resilience during a game day
• 4. Practice communication and documentation

The Azure Front Door service is inherently resilient to regional cable cuts because it operates as a global entry point on Microsoft's backbone network. For added protection for workloads, you should combine Front Door's native multi-regional routing with multi-region application deployment and a DNS-based failover service like Azure Traffic Manager for extra redundancy.

In light of recent connectivity disruptions impacting Azure Front Door (AFD), such as the DDoS-related congestion in July 2024 and the configuration change incident in August 2024, incident runbooks must evolve beyond simple service-level failures. The new focus should be on proactive monitoring, multi-layered failover, and validating application behavior under broader network conditions that can affect the AFD platform itself.

Some of the best content delivery network platforms are as follows:

• Gcore CDN
• Medianova
• Google Cloud CDN
• KeyCDN
• Fastly CDN
• MetaCDN