When to use Azure Content Delivery Network
Azure Content Delivery Network provides Adatum with many features to ensure that the services can scale globally to meet emergency-services demand during monitored natural disasters. Azure Content Delivery Network helps Adatum meet its needs in the following ways:
Azure Content Delivery Network assists with large scaling to better handle instantaneous high loads. Large scaling is useful for Adatum because it ensures that emergency-services organizations can access satellite imagery as a disaster unfolds. Large scaling also minimizes the chance that Adatum's services become unavailable during a disaster.
You can deploy Azure Content Delivery Network resources in locations close to new customers as those customers subscribe to the service. Instead of deploying new IaaS VMs to host catastrophe imagery around the world, Adatum can configure a new POP in a location close to where the new customers are.
Azure Content Delivery Network allows content to be delivered to POPs that are close to where customers need to access that data. Adatum can ensure that a POP in Australia is populated with imagery related to an unfolding catastrophe in Australia, while a separate POP in South America can be populated with imagery related to events unfolding there. The internet traffic related to each region's POP can also be geo-filtered to ensure that data at the Australian POP isn't accessible to clients from outside the region, reducing the likelihood of "curiosity demand" making the service unavailable.
When not to use Azure Content Delivery Network
Content delivery networks are typically best suited to technologies that employ many large static files, such as photographic imagery. Content delivery networks are most useful where you need the ability to serve files to a large number of simultaneous users worldwide, which is appropriate for Adatum because natural disasters don't occur according to predictable patterns. If Adatum's content was more dynamic, such as providing a service where satellite video was being streamed directly from Adatum servers, Azure Content Delivery Network wouldn't offer significant advantages. This is because real-time live streaming doesn't substantially benefit in the same way that static files (including prerecorded video files) do from being cached in locations around the world.