Lumen help

Quick Start: Creating your first CDN configuration

In this page, you will learn how to quickly bootstrap your first CDN configuration and deploy it in production.

If you are unfamiliar with Lumen CDN, you can first read our CDN accounts and user management guide to familiarize yourself with our terminology.

Activate your account

To create an account, you will need to speak to our Sales representatives, who will provide you with the best offer for your needs.

Once you have your CDN caching contract in place, you will receive a service activation email. Among other things, it provides you with these key items:

Service Component ID (SCID): This alpha-numeric ID uniquely identifies a specific caching service instance. Learn more about your account and our terminology.
Subscriber ID: A numeric only identifier that is mapped directly to your SCID and is only required if you are using our API. Learn more about direct access to your caching service via our API.

Depending on your engagement, we may have already created a base configuration for you, in which case you will already have a configuration to view upon login. Otherwise, you may be welcomed by a blank slate from which to begin.

Create your first configuration

Once you have access to the Media Portal, you are ready to create your first configuration.

Go to My Services > Caching and select your Access Group and Service Component ID (SCID).
Go into the "Configurations" section. Select the configuration that has been started for you. If starting from scratch, click on "Add configuration", and give it a name. A "Configuration" is a collection of Lumen CDN Properties that convey how, when, and when not to deliver you content.
Click on "Add property" and give it a name. A "Property" is a the combination of one or more "Aliases" (the hostname through which the CDN content will be served), and an "Origin Fill Policy" (details on how and when to fetch the source content), and optional "Property Match Logic" (granular conditions-based treatments based on the request-response characteristics). For this exercise, we’ll skip the optional Property Match Logic section.
Begin by adding an "Origin Fill Policy". You will provide details for a single host, or multiple hosts and failover criteria. Once completed, you can reuse for other properties as desired.
Then add your "Aliases". You will need to add at least one "Primary Alias" that will be the main hostname you will use to deliver the CDN cached content. You can also add secondary aliases, and customize your alias options.
Select your "Traffic Type" (General Settings). Select a type that best matches your needs. If neither of the categories fully correspond to your content, leave VOD as default.
For now, skip the optional "Property Match Logic" section. This is where you can create granular settings based on conditions you define.
Save your property changes, and Commit your Configuration, which creates stores your configuration with a version number on our servers. You are now ready to deploy your Configuration into production!

Push your configuration to production

Now that you have created your first configuration, the next step is to deploy it on our CDN network. Initially you will deploy using what is called "single-slot mode". This is a traditional deployment style that deploys the configuration instructions to all of our CDN servers. But once you’ve done this, you’ll want learn about and take advantage of our "Staged Activation" feature, based on the Canary release principle. Learn more about Deployments and Staged Activation.

To deploy your Configuration in production:

Go to "Configurations" section, find your new config, and click on "Deploy". We also display the latest version of your configuration. You can always review, edit, and even deploy older versions by clicking on the "Versions" tab.
In the Deployment popup, select the production slot you would like to use. If this is your first deployment, you will be in single-slot mode and should deploy directly to the "Current" (main) slot. If you already have a configuration in this production slot, you can use our Staged Deployment feature, and add your new Config to the "Candidate" production slot. Here you will want to choose the percent of traffic that will be affected by the new configuration. Add an optional comment and then submit your deployment.
Go to the "Production" section to see your configuration’s deployment state. It usually takes a few minutes for a new configuration to be deployed across the whole network. Once you see that your deployment status is Deployed, congratulations, your new configuration is now in production!

Bind your Traffic to the Lumen edge domains by adding CNAME values to your DNS

Now that you have created a configuration, added your first property, and deployed it in production, all your have to do is to modify your CNAME records in your DNS registry.

For this:

Go scroll down the "Production" section, and go into the "CNAMES" tab. You should now have a CNAME value corresponding to each of your aliases.
Add the corresponding CNAME values into your DNS registry.
Once the DNS change is propagated, our CDN should start receiving traffic. You can verify it by testing in your browser, or going into our "Monitoring" section.

Monitor your traffic

We offer several different ways to monitor and analyze your traffic:

Go to our Real Time Monitoring (Real Time Monitoring / Monitor and troubleshoot landing page) to monitor your traffic in near real-time. Learn more about Real Time Monitoring.
See historical traffic data in our Historical data section and create specific reports and alerts in our Reporting section. Learn more about Reporting.

Going Further

Now that you have fully deployed a first property into production, you can explore the many other features that our edge caching CDN provides!

Advanced configuration management

In the "Configurations" section, you can learn to create new versions of your config with advanced parameters and conditions (Match Rules) to build complex caching logic such as content geo-restriction, to create custom responses depending on client request/response headers, etc. Explore Configuration Management capabilities.