134
CDN for static assets in backend apps
planned
K
Kai Marshland
I would like to use Render's CDN for static sites to serve static assets for my non-static apps built with frameworks like Rails or Django.
This would let me turn off the option for Rails to serve static files. In a typical setup, this would be off and static assets would be served directly from the CDN and these requests would never hit the (comparatively slow) Rails app.
Log In
Activity
Newest
Oldest
D
Dexter Miguel
This is a big +1 for me too. Remix allows us to specify Cache Control headers per route. Being able to have the cache the web app's specific routes on a CDN would be
fantastic
.
Anurag Goel
Dexter Miguel: This is very much still on the roadmap, and as part of this work we will respect custom Cache Control headers for CDN caching. We're also planning to cache most static file extensions by default.
S
Sven Schwyn
Ouch, I only see this now after some load tests and might very much be a dealbreaker for us. Serving the assets through the app is not an option at all. And serving them seaprately from a static site (which does CDN) is ugly and error prone (deploy sync). Maybe you could consider a really easy to implement workaround for the time being? Add an asset directory to the backend config and serve it's contents by the Nginx proxy directly without hitting Passenger (for Rails). Here's the config we use on metal so far:
location ~ ^/assets/ {
expires 1y;
add_header Cache-Control public;
add_header Last-Modified "";
add_header ETag "";
access_log off;
gzip_static on;
break;
}
Anurag Goel
Sven Schwyn: we plan to add far futures headers for all static file extensions listed here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cache/about/default-cache-behavior/#default-cached-file-extensions. Will that work for you?
S
Sven Schwyn
Anurag Goel: Thanks for the update! The mentioned extensions would cover most of our use case. There are a few more (TXT for robots.txt, HTML e.g. for error pages like 404.html and JSON), but I see why they are not listed since they might break things for some sites. Do you thing this feature might be rolled before mid May? For an event, we expect a lot of traffic then which is why we migrate to Render in the first place.
Anurag Goel
Sven Schwyn: with a lot of constantly changing priorities, it's hard to pin down an ETA. We still expect to work on this feature this summer and will mark it in progress once we're actively developing it.
G
Guillaume Simard
This is one of the biggest drawback of Render.com vs Vercel when it comes to Next.js applications right now.
B
Ben Beecher
Big +1 for this feature. Might be worth thinking about how this integrates with CF since that's already in every deploy
Anurag Goel
We're planning to enable default CDN caching for backend applications later this year. This means any web service will be able to cache assets at the edge, with support for
Cache-Control
headers.M
Mounir Benabderrahmane
Anurag Goel: what's the status on this?
Anurag Goel
Mounir Benabderrahmane: still in the planning stage, but getting closer.
Anurag Goel
Merged in a post:
Automatic edge caching on apps
A
Alex J
On Vercel you can get automatic edge-caching on all requests simply by defining a cache header.
Their edge-caching is not only possible for SSG-sites either, even if that's what they promote, you can even use their edge caching on api requests or even when doing an SSR-enabled Next.js-app.
I guess it is possible to configure one's own integration with Cloudflare or Fastly on top of Render but it'd be nicer if it'd be possible to just tick a box in render's UI and that it would be automatically cleared on every deploy, etc, similar to Vercel.
S
Sylvain Kerkour
I would like to see this as well, For me the biggest selling point would be instant and painless cache invalidation on each deploy, like the static websites!
My use case is as following:
my users embed
/libs/client.js
on their websites, which is served by my backend. I want this file to be cached at each CDN edges. The file may change at each deploy, so I don't want a painful and manual cache invalidation (like Cloudfront) each time the file change.D
Daniel Boggs
I would like to see this as well as the ability for the CDN to honor the cache control headers for responses that are technically dynamically generated as well. A reverse proxy for all http traffic essentially, not only static assets.
Anurag Goel
Daniel Boggs: good point. We'll make sure that our CDN implementation for backend servers honors cache control headers from the origin.
T
Travis Fischer
Anurag Goel: Just adding that we'd strongly like this functionality as well. Using cloudflare as a go-between is a potentially viable workaround for now but the way we have our DNS setup in addition to transparently handling dynamic subdomains alongside SSL will make this challenging. We'd much rather just enable this option within Render and have it honor cache-control headers for us.
T
Travis Fischer
Anurag Goel: One source of inspiration for related functionality from ZEIT https://zeit.co/docs/v2/serverless-functions/edge-caching/
Anurag Goel
planned
E
Eyal
Anurag Goel: +1 on this FR. Can you share an estimated ETA 🤓 ?
F
Franklin Kumro Jr
Anurag Goel: This has been planned for almost 1 year, any chance you can provide an estimate?