Environment

An environment identifies a CDN network that has a specialized purpose. Rules Engine allows a deploy request to be submitted to either of the following environments:

• Production: Identifies the CDN network that serves live traffic.
• Staging: Identifies the CDN network that acts as a sandbox for testing new configurations. The policies deployed to this environment will not affect live traffic.

Only a single policy per environment may be active at any given time.

Production

The Production environment identifies the traditional CDN network that is responsible for a live site's content delivery. All CDN settings (e.g., customer origin and edge CNAMEs), with the exception of deploy requests to the Staging environment, are applied to this environment.

Purge requests are applied to both the Staging and Production environments.

Deploy Request Best Practice

The recommended workflow for pushing a new Rules Engine configuration to the Production environment is described below.

1. Submit a deploy request to the Staging environment.
2. Once it is deployed, test and validate the new configuration with mock site traffic.
3. Fine-tune the configuration by duplicating the policy, making the desired changes to the draft, and then repeating steps 1 and 2.
4. Submit a deploy request to the Production environment.

Staging

The Staging environment provides a sandbox through which end-to-end tests of new CDN configurations may be performed without impacting live site traffic. This means that it allows mock site traffic to flow through our Staging network to an origin server. This environment emulates the architecture of the Production environment on a much smaller scale. It also replicates your CDN configuration (e.g., customer origins, edge CNAMEs, Token-based Authentication, etc.).

This environment allows:

• The validation of a new configuration before applying it to live site traffic.
• Experimentation with match conditions and features.

Key information:

• The Staging environment is designed for functional testing and is of a much smaller scale than the Production CDN environment. Therefore, this environment should not be used to perform scale, volume, or throughput testing.

  Please keep traffic below the following levels:

  • 50 Mbps
  • 500 requests per second
• Changes to your configuration in this environment do not affect live site traffic.
• Standard usage charges apply to the Staging environment.
• Testing HTTPS traffic via the Staging environment will result in a TLS certificate mismatch.

• With regards to firewall configuration, the Staging environment does not require additional whitelisting. The IP blocks defined on the Customer Origin page include our staging POPs.

  Learn more.

• With regards to analytics, traffic generated for the Staging environment will be treated as standard traffic. Our reports will not make a distinction between production and staging traffic. However, it may be possible to view usage reports for the Staging environment by generating a report by:

  • Edge CNAME: An edge CNAME configuration may be created specifically for the Staging environment. Track staging traffic for this edge CNAME by enabling custom reports and then generating an Edge CNAMEs report.
  • POP: The Bandwidth and Data Transferred reports allow report data to be filtered by POP. Use this capability to filter report data for traffic served through our staging POP. A staging POP may be identified via the CSTG labelNorth America : Newark (CSTG).
• Purge requests are applied to both the Staging and Production environments.
• CAN: A staging POP will act as the primary CAN gateway location for all traffic directed to customer origins.
• HTTPS Traffic: HTTPS traffic will generate TLS certificate name mismatch messages on the Staging environment. This message indicates that the hostname defined in the TLS certificate does not match the one defined in the request URL (e.g., staging.can.0001.transactcdn.com). This message is not indicative of a configuration issue on the Staging environment and it may be safely ignored.

Using the Staging Environment

Requests may be directed to the Staging environment by prepending staging. to the hostname defined in a CDN URL.

Sample CDN URL (Production):

Sample CDN URL (Staging):

Edge CNAME URLs

Alternatively, traffic may be directed to the Staging environment via an edge CNAME URL.

This requires performing the following steps:

1. Create an edge CNAME configuration.

2. From your DNS service provider, create a CNAME record that points the above edge CNAME to:

   staging.CDNHostname

   Example:

   staging.can.0001.transactcdn.com

Edgecast CDN