Cost Optimization & Traffic Management Flashcards

A multi-CDN architecture routes traffic based on real-time performance scores. What is the PRIMARY cost trade-off of this approach?

Answer: Routing intelligence overhead adds operational complexity but can reduce overall spend by avoiding SLA penalties

Multi-CDN routing adds orchestration complexity and tooling costs but can reduce spend by leveraging competitive pricing and avoiding costly SLA breach penalties.

Which mechanism allows a CDN to serve content from a nearby PoP even when the authoritative PoP for that region is overloaded?

Answer: Anycast failover to an alternate PoP

Anycast routing automatically redirects traffic to the next-best available PoP when the primary PoP is overloaded, maintaining availability without manual intervention.

A CDN customer wants to reduce costs for an API that serves personalized responses. What caching strategy is appropriate?

Answer: Use edge-side includes to cache the non-personalized skeleton and fetch only personalized fragments from origin

ESI allows the CDN to cache the static portions of a page/response while only fetching dynamic, personalized fragments from origin, balancing cost and personalization.

What is 'egress cost optimization through protocol efficiency' in a CDN context?

Answer: Using HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 multiplexing to serve more content per connection, reducing connection overhead costs

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 multiplex multiple requests over a single connection, reducing connection establishment overhead and improving throughput efficiency.

A CDN provider offers 'commit discounts' of 20% for 50 TB/month commitments. A customer averages 45 TB/month with peaks of 70 TB. What is the optimal procurement strategy?

Answer: Commit to 50 TB for the discount and pay on-demand rates for overage above 50 TB

Committing at 50 TB captures the discount for most monthly usage while limiting over-commitment exposure; peak overage is handled at on-demand rates.

Which CDN traffic management feature automatically routes traffic away from a failing origin region to a healthy backup region?

Answer: Automatic failover / origin health checks

Origin health checks continuously probe origin endpoints and trigger automatic failover to backup origins when primary origins become unresponsive.

A CDN customer is evaluating costs for a static website with highly cacheable assets. Which metric should they prioritize to minimize monthly bills?

Answer: Cache hit ratio (origin offload rate)

For highly cacheable static content, maximizing the cache hit ratio directly minimizes origin egress charges and is the most cost-sensitive metric to track.