Microsoft Launches Azure CDN from Akamai

Azure’s Akamai-powered content delivery network (CDN) has launched in general availability, Microsoft announced Wednesday.

Azure CDN from Akamai provides speed and reliability benefits for Azure customers through content caching and acceleration. Partner Director of Azure Media and Azure CDN Services Sudheer Sirivara said in a blog post that 90 percent of global Internet users are a single “network hop” from an Akamai CDN server, and emphasized the benefits of an expanded reach in Latin America and Asia.

Akamai and Microsoft have partnered for major sporting events and software updates in the past, and Akamai’s capabilities have now been integrated directly into the Azure cloud platform, the company said.

“We are excited that the combined strength of Akamai and Azure creates a complete solution with global reach for developing, deploying and delivering – as well as protecting – web, mobile and media cloud-based applications,” said Akamai VP of media product and operations Michael Fay.

Microsoft developed its own CDN years ago, and announced it would offer Verizon’s CDN in January 2015, around the time CloudHarmony was reporting that Azure and Akamai were among a number of CDNs which had gone a year without any downtime. Now Azure customers will be able to select Akamai as the provider of their “standard” package CDN, for the same price as Verizon.  Only Verizon CDN is offered as a “premium” CDN.

The content delivery network has been in preview since it was announced in the fall. LG, TVN, MEKmedia, and TVB are among media, production, and broadcast companies that participated in the preview.

Among public cloud providers, AWS offers CloudFront, while Google launched a partnership with several CDNs last September.

Azure pitched support upgrades to enterprise customers last month as it attempts to provide a broad portfolio of cloud services.

Akamai acquired video delivery optimization company Octoshape a year ago to boost its streaming capabilities.