Azure provides CDN. You can link websites, cloud services, mobile services, media services and storage accounts. Most of the cases we link the storage accounts to CDN. Because CDN is a very good choice for static content and in Azure mostly we keep the static content in the storage accounts (blobs).

CDN provides a greater network among different geographical network and place the content in the “Edge Servers” as they’re physically close to the users’ location. Azure Cache is a different service it offers in memory cache for high speed availability, it is relatively expensive compared to CDN. See this article on how to create Azure Cache.

Creating a CDN in Azure is fairly straight forward. Login to the Management Portal and Select the CDN and create new endpoint. You have the Quick Create option. You get the below screen. In the origin domain you can see your available services that could be linked as CDN endpoints under each category. Here I select my storage account as origin domain. You can notice that automatically the storage account’s blob storage service is linked with the CDN as it holds the static content. Neither the Table storage nor the Queue storage is linked as CDN.

I created a public container in the above blob storage and uploaded  a simple text file. The public URI for the resource goes as http://qbemediasvc.blob.core.windows.net/publiccontainer/dfdf.txt

Out CDN endpoint URL goes as http://az673726.vo.msecnd.net/

In order to check the content is in CDN we can simply append the last part of the blob URI to the CDN endpoint URL and we get the CDN URL as this. http://az673726.vo.msecnd.net/publiccontainer/dfdf.txt

When you put a content in the storage it will take up to 60 minutes for that content to propagate to CDN and once the propagation is done you can access the CDN rather than the direct URL of the content.