R – Should an intranet web application utilize a CDN

cdnintranetweb-applications

With the Announcement of the Microsoft AJAX CDN a debate arouse this morning about whether utilizing a public CDN for common libraries was a good idea for intranet applications. I can see both sides of the argument but without revealing too much of our discussion I wanted to put forth the topic on Stack Overflow to see other's opinions.

Best Answer

I'm a big fan of using CDNs for these things, but I think it would be a rare exception when using Google or Microsoft's CDN would be appropriate for an Intranet application.

  1. For users on an internal network, an external request (even to a fast, nearby CDN) will be much slower than an internal request.
  2. Often, these things need to be accessible when no Internet connection is present on the client.
  3. Even if you do have geographically dispersed VPN users, all of their requests are often being routed through the company's network anyway, making the CDN request even slower than the VPN-local request.
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