My objective is to achieve zero downtime during deployment. My site uses akamai as CDN. Lets say I do have primary and secondary cluster of IIS servers. During deployment, the updates are made to secondary cluster. Before switchover from primary to secondary, can I request akamai to cache the content and do a cutover at a specified time?
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The problem you are going to have is to guarantee that your content is cached on ALL akamai servers. Is the issue that you want to force content to be refreshed as soon as you cutover?
There are a few options here.
1 - Use a version in the requests "?v=1". This version would ALWAYS be requested from origin and would be appended to every request. As soon as you update your site, update the version on origin, so that the next request will append "?v=2" thus "busting" the cache and forcing an origin hit for all requests
2 - Change your akamai config to "honor webserver TTLs". You can then set very low or almost 0 TTLs right before you cut over and then increase gradually after you cutover
3 - Configure akamai to use If-MOdified-Since. This will force akamai to "validate" if any requests have changed.
4 - Use ECCU which can purge a whole directory, but this can take up to 40 minutes, but should be manageable during a maint window.
Dberg
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I don't think this would be possible based on my experience with Akamai (but things change faster than I can keep up with) - you can flush the content manually (at a cost) so you could flush /* we used to do this for particular files during deployments (never /* because we had over 1.2M URLs) but I can't see how Akamai could cache a non-visible version of your site for instant cut-over without having some secondary domain and origin.
However I have also found that Akamai are pretty good to deal with and it would definitely be worth contacting them in relation to a solution.
Rob
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