DFS 9.3.0 - CDN support

DAM for Sitecore has to option two accelerate media content leveraging CDN providers. This guide focuses on Azure CDN, which supports the following providers:

Standard Microsoft
Standard Akamai
Standard Verizon
Premium Verizon

However, other CDN providers are expected to work as well.

For a better understanding of what CDN is, we refer to Azure CDN documenation

Setting up Digizuite to leverage CDN requires two steps:

To understand how it works, it is important to understand what a CDN is and how it works. Please see the documentation above.

Technically, what happens in Sitecore is that the URLs generated for assets are CDN URLs pointing to the CDN endpoint, rather than Sitecore. This means that all media content is loaded through a CDN cache.

Understanding the URLs

When configuring CDN, the URLs slightly change. It uses the following scheme:

URL

https://<yourCDNProvider>/dfsmedia/556263ca06c04a0b9ce37eaffe99257a/723-50044

We refer to the following documentation for an explanation of what the different parameters mean.

The different between the standard URLs and the CDN URLs is they are prefixed with CDN provider url.

Security

The current implementation does not provide any security between the CDN and the client. What this means, is that once the media is cached in the CDN, the url for it, is publicly available until the CDN cache expires and/or is purged.

There is, however, security imposed between the CDN and the Digizuite. Notice that the url contains an accesskey as query parameter. If this accesskey is not valid, then the media request will get an access denied. So this means, if content is not cached and it is requested with an invalid accesskey, then the request will be denied.