Azure Static Web Apps are a serverless web app hosting service for static web apps, which Microsoft manages. The company now announced a preview of Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-grade edge powered by Azure Front Door, enabling faster page loads, enhanced security, and increased reliability for global apps with no configuration or additional code required.
The enterprise-grade edge is a new functionality that provides increased protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assaults, drastically reduces latency, and helps customers’ static web apps global users increase throughput. It combines the capabilities of Azure Static Web Apps, Azure Front Door, and Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) into a single secure cloud CDN platform.
In a recent Azure blog post on Azure Static Web Apps enterprise-edge, Simona Cotin, a principal program manager, explains one of the benefits:
Enabling the enterprise-grade edge further increases your global presence by caching your website’s static content across 118+ points of presence (POP) across 100 metro cities. As a result, your app runs with lower latency and higher throughput to your end-users.
According to the Microsoft documentation, developers can enable enterprise-grade edge through the Azure portal or set it up manually. The latter allows them to get complete control over the CDN configuration, including limiting traffic origin by origin, adding a web application firewall, and using more advanced features of Azure Front Door. Once the developer enables enterprise-grade edge for their applications, Microsoft will migrate their live traffic to its enhanced global distributed network with no downtime and provide caching benefits at CDN, DNS, and browser levels.
Other static web app services like Azure Static Web Apps are AWS Amplify, Netifly, Vercel, and Cloudflare Pages. The latter became GA in April 2021, while AWS Amplify, Netifly, and Vercel have been available for some time. These competitive offerings also provide similar features such as low latency and high throughput through points of presence around the globe.
Akhilesh Nirapure, a cloud architect at International Computing Center, respondent in a tweet to the announcement by the Azure Static Web Apps team:
This is a great addon; pair it with geo-distributed DB service. Interesting to see a service within Azure that simplifies geo-distributed compute (Function?) and reduces cost. Without worrying about deployment/user location. Quite similar to services like Cloudflare Workers, Netlify?
Lastly, developers can share feedback through the Azure Static Web Apps GitHub repo.
