Skip to content
Marketing Factory Digital GmbH
Contact

CDN Provider Selection and Integration

SEGGER products are used worldwide for developing, analyzing, and manufacturing microcontroller systems. Reliable access to documentation and software, available through the website, is critical for developers. High availability and fast download times are essential for customer satisfaction.

To enhance these aspects, we were tasked with selecting a suitable Content Delivery Network (CDN) and implementing it specifically for documentation and software downloads. Additionally, the CDN was configured to serve static assets from the website to further improve performance and optimize the user experience.

ClientSEGGER Microcontroller GmbH

Project duration

2021
Show larger version for: The image displays a grid of line charts illustrating HTTP average latency metrics for different IP addresses over time. Each chart features time on the horizontal axis and latency in milliseconds on the vertical axis, with current latency values highlighted for each IP.
Comparison latency CDN Provider

CDN Provider Selection

As part of a market analysis, we compared multiple CDN providers based on pricing and the number of Points of Presence (PoPs) in SEGGER's key markets. Since no specialized features like edge computing were required, the focus was on cost-efficiency and high coverage in Europe and the United States. This narrowed the potential providers to the large cloud vendors, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

After several weeks of performance testing from various international locations, we found no significant differences in performance among the providers. Due to Amazon CloudFront's wider PoP coverage in Europe, it was ultimately chosen for implementation.

Amazon CloudFront Implementation

In this project, the goal at SEGGER was not to deliver the entire website via the CDN but to focus on static content such as documentation and software downloads, as well as CSS, JS, and image files. Because the TYPO3-generated HTML, cached by Varnish, represents only a small portion of the website, we anticipated a noticeable performance boost across the entire application.

CloudFront was configured as a caching CDN, with necessary adjustments made directly within SEGGER’s AWS account. The source web server was set up to allow the CDN to access only static data, preventing HTML content from being accidentally cached.

Following manual CDN tests, we updated the URLs for static files in the HTML source code via a central TypoScript modification, ensuring they pointed to the CDN host. This configuration is active only for the live system, excluding test and development environments.

Project Completion

With the CDN setup and cache initialized, the project was successfully finished. Post-implementation, we observed improved browser performance, which also could positively impact Google's ranking metrics.

Follow-up: Decommissioning of External Download Server

Previously, SEGGER used a separate server for larger software downloads. Given the positive experience with the CDN, these downloads were also migrated to CloudFront, allowing the additional server to be decommissioned as part of a broader infrastructure consolidation effort.