Couple neat Windows Azure Storage related announcements

In case you missed this on the Windows Azure blog, there were a couple of neat announcements around new storage features:

Content Delivery Network: https://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network.aspx

Windows Azure CDN has 18 locations globally (United States, Europe, Asia, Australia and South America) and continues to expand. Windows Azure CDN caches your Windows Azure blobs at strategically placed locations to provide maximum bandwidth for delivering your content to users. You can enable CDN delivery for any storage account via the Windows Azure Developer Portal. The CDN provides edge delivery only to blobs that are in public blob containers, which are available for anonymous access.

The benefit of using a CDN is better performance and user experience for users who are farther from the source of the content stored in the Windows Azure Blob service. In addition, Windows Azure CDN provides worldwide high-bandwidth access to serve content for popular events.

Custom Storage Domain Names: https://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/11/05/accessing-windows-azure-blobs-using-custom-storage-domain-names.aspx

The custom storage domain name feature allows you to register a custom domain name for a given storage account for anonymous blob access using that domain name. Currently we provide access to blob storage using the following domain name:

https://<account>.blob.core.windows.net/<container>/<blobname>

But if I owned a domain called “toddlers.wingtiptoys.com”, I may instead want my blobs accessible via:

https://toddlers.wingtiptoys.com/\<container>/<blobname>

I'm really excited about both features as they are just so important in terms of allowing our customers to build professional and high performance web sites. 

In the case of CDN, it allows you to leverage Microsoft's content delivery capabilities for your own web sites - how cool is that?