Using Azure Content Delivery Network with SAS

Article
09/27/2024

Important

Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) will be retired on September 30, 2027. To avoid any service disruption, it is important that you migrate your Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) profiles to Azure Front Door Standard or Premium tier by September 30, 2027. For more information, see Azure CDN Standard from Microsoft (classic) retirement.

Azure CDN from Edgio will be retired on November 4, 2025. You must migrate your workload to Azure Front Door before this date to avoid service disruption. For more information, see Azure CDN from Edgio retirement FAQ.

When you set up a storage account for Azure Content Delivery Network to use to cache content, by default anyone who knows the URLs for your storage containers can access the files that you've uploaded. To protect the files in your storage account, you can set the access of your storage containers from public to private. However, if you do so, no one is able to access your files.

If you want to grant limited access to private storage containers, you can use the Shared Access Signature (SAS) feature of your Azure Storage account. A SAS is a URI that grants restricted access rights to your Azure Storage resources without exposing your account key. You can provide a SAS to clients that you don't trust with your storage account key but to whom you want to delegate access to certain storage account resources. By distributing a Shared Access Signature URI to these clients, you grant them access to a resource for a specified period of time.

With a SAS, you can define various parameters of access to a blob, such as start and expiry times, permissions (read/write), and IP ranges. This article describes how to use SAS with Azure Content Delivery Network. For more information about SAS, including how to create it and its parameter options, see Using shared access signatures (SAS).

Setting up Azure Content Delivery Network to work with storage SAS

The following two options are recommended for using SAS with Azure Content Delivery Network. All options assume that you've already created a working SAS (see prerequisites).

Prerequisites

To start, create a storage account and then generate a SAS for your asset. You can generate two types of stored access signatures: a service SAS or an account SAS. For more information, see Types of shared access signatures.

After you've generated a SAS token, you can access your blob storage file by appending ?sv=<SAS token> to your URL. This URL has the following format:

https://<account name>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<file>?sv=<SAS token>

For example:

https://democdnstorage1.blob.core.windows.net/container1/demo.jpg?sv=2017-07-29&ss=b&srt=co&sp=r&se=2038-01-02T21:30:49Z&st=2018-01-02T13:30:49Z&spr=https&sig=QehoetQFWUEd1lhU5iOMGrHBmE727xYAbKJl5ohSiWI%3D

For more information about setting parameters, see SAS parameter considerations and Shared Access Signature parameters.

Screenshot of the content delivery network SAS settings.

Option 1: Using SAS with pass-through to blob storage from Azure Content Delivery Network

This option is the simplest and uses a single SAS token, which is passed from Azure Content Delivery Network to the origin server.

Select an endpoint, select Caching rules, then select Cache every unique URL from the Query string caching list.
After you set up SAS on your storage account, you must use the SAS token with the content delivery network endpoint and origin server URLs to access the file.

The resulting content delivery network endpoint URL has the following format: https://<endpoint hostname>.azureedge.net/<container>/<file>?sv=<SAS token>

For example:

https://demoendpoint.azureedge.net/container1/demo.jpg?sv=2017-07-29&ss=b&srt=c&sp=r&se=2027-12-19T17:35:58Z&st=2017-12-19T09:35:58Z&spr=https&sig=kquaXsAuCLXomN7R00b8CYM13UpDbAHcsRfGOW3Du1M%3D
Fine-tune the cache duration either by using caching rules or by adding Cache-Control headers at the origin server. Because Azure Content Delivery Network treats the SAS token as a plain query string, as a best practice you should set up a caching duration that expires at or before the SAS expiration time. Otherwise, if a file is cached for a longer duration than the SAS is active, the file might be accessible from the Azure Content Delivery Network origin server after the SAS expiration time has elapsed. If this situation occurs, and you want to make your cached file inaccessible, you must perform a purge operation on the file to clear it from the cache. For information about setting the cache duration on Azure Content Delivery Network, see Control Azure Content Delivery Network caching behavior with caching rules.

Option 2: Using content delivery network security token authentication with a rewrite rule

To use Azure Content Delivery Network security token authentication, you must have an Azure CDN Premium from Edgio profile. This option is the most secure and customizable. Client access is based on the security parameters that you set on the security token. Once you've created and set up the security token, it's required on all content delivery network endpoint URLs. However, because of the URL Rewrite rule, the SAS token isn't required on the content delivery network endpoint. If the SAS token later becomes invalid, Azure Content Delivery Network can't revalidate the content from the origin server.

Create an Azure Content Delivery Network security token and activate it by using the rules engine for the content delivery network endpoint and path where your users can access the file.

A security token endpoint URL has the following format:

https://<endpoint hostname>.azureedge.net/<container>/<file>?<security_token>

For example:

https://sasstoragedemo.azureedge.net/container1/demo.jpg?a4fbc3710fd3449a7c99986bkquaXsAuCLXomN7R00b8CYM13UpDbAHcsRfGOW3Du1M%3D

The parameter options for a security token authentication are different than the parameter options for a SAS token. If you choose to use an expiration time when you create a security token, you should set it to the same value as the expiration time for the SAS token. Doing so ensures that the expiration time is predictable.
Use the rules engine to create a URL Rewrite rule to enable SAS token access to all blobs in the container. New rules take up to 4 hours to propagate.

The following sample URL Rewrite rule uses a regular expression pattern with a capturing group and an endpoint named sasstoragedemo:

Source:

(container1/.*)

Destination:

$1&sv=2017-07-29&ss=b&srt=c&sp=r&se=2027-12-19T17:35:58Z&st=2017-12-19T09:35:58Z&spr=https&sig=kquaXsAuCLXomN7R00b8CYM13UpDbAHcsRfGOW3Du1M%3D
If you renew the SAS, ensure that you update the URL Rewrite rule with the new SAS token.

SAS parameter considerations

Because SAS parameters aren't visible to Azure Content Delivery Network, Azure Content Delivery Network can't change its delivery behavior based on them. The defined parameter restrictions apply only on requests that Azure Content Delivery Network makes to the origin server, not for requests from the client to Azure Content Delivery Network. This distinction is important to consider when you set SAS parameters. If these advanced capabilities are required and you're using Option 2, set the appropriate restrictions on the Azure Content Delivery Network security token.

SAS parameter name	Description
Start	The time that Azure Content Delivery Network can begin to access the blob file. Due to clock skew (when a clock signal arrives at different times for different components), choose a time 15 minutes earlier if you want the asset to be available immediately.
End	The time after which Azure Content Delivery Network can no longer access the blob file. Previously cached files on Azure Content Delivery Network are still accessible. To control the file expiry time, either set the appropriate expiry time on the Azure Content Delivery Network security token or purge the asset.
Allowed IP addresses	Optional. If you're using Azure CDN from Edgio, you can set this parameter to the ranges defined in Azure Content Delivery Network from Edgio Edge Server IP Ranges.
Allowed protocols	The protocols allowed for a request made with the account SAS. The HTTPS setting is recommended.

Next steps

For more information about SAS, see the following articles:

For more information about setting up token authentication, see Securing Azure Content Delivery Network assets with token authentication.

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