Exercise - Update a Website and republish to a Content Delivery Network

  • 6 minutes

Now that your delivery network is configured, let's verify that your site content is being delivered through the CDN.

In this unit, review how CDNs update content and the delay that you typically see when updating the source files.

Review both the Origin Server and CDN Versions

Open the URLs for the origin server and the link to the CDN-published version in different browser windows. Then update the origin server with new files and see how long it takes for that change to propagate.

  1. Open a web browser.

  2. In the address bar, enter the URL to your origin website in the form storageaccountnameXXXX.Z22.web.core.windows.net from the previous exercise. XXXX is the random number assigned to your site. Your original website should appear.

    Screenshot of the website through the storage account endpoint.

  3. Open another browser tab.

  4. Enter the URL of your Endpoint Hostname from the CDN endpoint in the form endpointname.azureedge.net. Again, the replicated copy of your source website should appear. You may see a Page not Found if the content hasn't propagated. Propagation can take a few minutes to complete and you may need to refresh the page.

    Screenshot of the website through the Azure CDN endpoint.

  5. Place both windows side by side on your screen. Both URLs can be found in the Azure portal, on the overview tab for the Endpoint you created in the previous exercise.

Change the Origin Files

  1. Navigate to the website source code in Cloud Shell if you're not there already:

    cd ~/source/website-files

  2. Open the index.html file in the code editor.

    code index.html

  3. Change the H1 tag to a message of your choice. (try "Hello CDN!")

    Screenshot of changing H1 in the index file to Hello CDN.

  4. Save (Ctrl + S) and close (Ctrl + Q) the editor.

  5. Upload the changed index.html to the $web blob storage container.

    az storage blob upload-batch -s . -d \$web --account-name $STORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAME --overwrite

Verify site changes

  1. Switch to the browser connecting to the source URL (web.core.windows.net) and press F5 to refresh the page. The changes to the image and text should appear immediately.

    Screenshot of the website through the storage account endpoint updated.

  2. Switch to the storageaccountnameXXXX.azureedge.net browser window and press F5 until the change appears. This operation should take less than 10 minutes to complete.

    Screenshot of the website through the Azure CDN endpoint updated.

  3. You may continue to the next unit while you wait for the CDN to update.