Azure vs. AWS questions (CDN and other services)

Question

Hi all,
We are currently migrating from AWS to Azure and we have a bunch of different questions mostly related to CDN (in comparison to AWS) that we couldn't find online:
What is the right way to have a CDN that returns static content (Storage) and fallbacks to a virtual machine when the content is not available? Think about a service that automatically creates images when you ask it to, and
saves them on a Storage bucket for later reuse. On AWS we could do this using CloudFront + 404 handling.
Is it there something similar enough to CloudFront? That can reroute queries based on paths and/or different http codes?
When hitting a CDN that reroutes to a VM we get "504 Gateway Timeout" on some requests, that same resources return fine if we ask the resource for a second time. What we are doing on that request is asking the Storage
service for some image and returning a 302 redirect if it's not there. Perhaps the first request takes too long and that's why the CDN throws that error? A fresh example of this was on this URL: http://az3.hinchas.co.uk/t/4/h/f/4hfaQHaZbRfvPSjsQVe4nH_768x768yz.jpg
What's the recommended or fastest way to access public Storage from a VM? We are currently using the public DNS.
There is still no way to have nodejs deamons that need some compilation, right? Versioning the compiled objects is not a option for us now, as we only develop on Linux and Mac and it would make our current build process way
more complex.
When using Azure's API service, can we customize API routes based on paths or parameters and proxy some requests to amazon in order to ease the migration ? 
Are there any recommended/official solutions to autoscale cassandra or elasticsearch clusters?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi,
Did you talk about azure CDN? If yes, When you enable CDN access for a storage account, the Windows Azure portal provides you with a domain name of the following
format: http:/ /<guid>.vo.msecnd.net/. This domain name can then be used to access blobs in a public container. When a request is made using the Windows Azure CDN URL, the request is redirected to the CDN endpoint closest to the location from which the
request was made to provide access to the blob. If the blob is not found at that endpoint, then it is retrieved from the Blob service and cached at the endpoint, where a time-to-live (TTL) setting is maintained for the cached blob. The TTL specifies that the
blob should be cached for that amount of time in the CDN until it is refreshed by the Blob service. The CDN attempts to refresh the blob from Windows Azure Blob service only once the TTL has elapsed. For more detail information about azure CDN, you could refer
to:http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2009/11/05/introducing-the-windows-azure-content-delivery-network/
If using azure CDN, we could not get the Gateway Timeout error.Fastest
way to access public Storage, you may consider the file sharing service:http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2014/05/12/introducing-microsoft-azure-file-service.aspx
For the Azure API related issue, I suggest you ask in Azure API Management forums:https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?forum=azureapimgmt
For the autoscaling, you could use the Azure Management API to achieve, more detail information, you could ask in Azure API forums as mentioned.
Regards.
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