Microsoft has sold several edges under two names, and the confusion is understandable because the names outlived the products. In 2026 the practical answer is short: Front Door is the strategy, and classic Azure CDN is a sunset in progress.
How the two diverged
Azure CDN was historically a storefront for multiple engines: Microsoft’s own network plus third-party options from Verizon and later Edgio lineages. Front Door grew separately as Microsoft’s global L7 entry service. The Edgio bankruptcy, whose network went dark in January 2025, forcibly retired the largest third-party lineage and accelerated Microsoft’s consolidation onto Front Door Standard and Premium as the flagship edge.
What Front Door actually gives you
A global anycast entry with split TCP, caching, rules engine, WAF on the Premium tier, private-link origins and health-probed failover. It behaves like a CDN fused with a global load balancer, and for Azure-resident applications the integration is genuinely strong: one resource, one policy surface, one bill.
The procurement angle deserves candor: consolidation removed the internal competition that once disciplined Microsoft’s edge pricing. When Azure CDN’s multiple engines existed, tension between options gave buyers leverage; with Front Door as the single path, the discipline must come from outside the Azure bill. A committed-rate quote from a specialist network, held next to your Front Door invoice at equal traffic, is now the only benchmark Microsoft’s pricing ever meets, and estates that skip the exercise are pricing loyalty at whatever the meter says.
Where it falls short of specialists
Cache control granularity, purge speed, media workflows and log immediacy trail dedicated networks, and pricing on egress-heavy workloads deserves real comparison against committed CDN rates. Front Door is a superb front door; it is a middling media-delivery network, and Microsoft largely agrees, which is why heavy streaming on Azure so often pairs with a specialist CDN anyway.
In practice
New builds on Azure: start with Front Door Standard, upgrade to Premium when WAF and private link matter, and benchmark egress-heavy paths against specialist rates before committing volume. Estates still holding classic CDN profiles: treat them as migration debt with a deadline that has already passed once, and audit what the forced 2025 moves left behind.
We benchmark Front Door against specialist rates on your actual Azure egress. The delta is frequently a budget line.