Migrating Traffic to a New CDN Provider

This guide walks you through the process of migrating traffic from an existing CDN provider to a new one using IO River. The migration is designed to be safe and gradual. Traffic is shifted incrementally while you monitor it at each stage, allowing you to catch issues early and roll back if needed.

The process has three main phases:

1. Local tests – Before switching traffic to the new provider, you should test it locally first. This can be done by overriding your hosts file to use the new provider’s IP address directly and verify that requests are handled correctly. For more details, see the IO River Testing HTTP Traffic Guide.

2. Change CNAME to IO River – Your domain is currently pointing to the old CDN CNAME. The next step is to modify the CNAME record so it points to the IO River service CNAME xxx.yyy.ioriveredge.net.

   1. Make sure the traffic policy is configured to route 100% of the traffic to the old CDN. This ensures that traffic continues to be served by the old CDN provider.
   2. You can verify this by resolving the service CNAME and confirming that it returns the old CDN CNAME.
   3. In your DNS provider, update the DNS record for your domain to point to the IO River service CNAME.

3. Gradual traffic migration – You can now begin migrating traffic incrementally to the new CDN.

   1. Start by routing 1% of traffic to the new CDN. Modify the default traffic policy accordingly, or create a static traffic policy scoped to a specific region if you want to limit the initial rollout.
   2. After this change, traffic will start to appear in the dashboard. Use the Comparison view to monitor traffic and compare metrics between the old and new CDN.
   3. Repeat this process in stages, allowing time between each step for monitoring (e.g. 1 day per step). We recommend the following progression: 1%, 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%, and finally 100%.
   4. Use the dashboards to monitor traffic and validate performance after each step before proceeding.