From the course: SharePoint Framework for Developers: 3 Deployment, Upgrades, and Lifecycle

Introduction: Office 365 CDN

From the course: SharePoint Framework for Developers: 3 Deployment, Upgrades, and Lifecycle

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Introduction: Office 365 CDN

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- [Instructor] Next, let's talk about the Office 365 CDN. You may be wondering, why am I talking about the Office 365 CDN in a SharePoint Framework course? Well, the obvious question is, why do we need a CDN? When you deploy a SharePoint Framework package sppkg file, usually that is just a pointer to where the actual JavaScript files come from. Certainly, it may contain other things like features et cetera, things that are not dependent on JavaScript files, but yes, if you have a web part, you're going to have some JavaScript files, maybe some JSON files, images, et cetera. Those files come from a CDN. When you deploy a web part in a typical SharePoint site, that web part is going to https download the actual running files from a CDN. It has to be https. So, we need a CDN. We have two choices for CDN. One, you can use your own CDN. This is just an https URL, but certainly you can leverage an Azure CDN, if you need more features. The disadvantage of that approach is that you have to modify your SharePoint Solution package before you can package it and deploy it. The URL for your CDN gets embedded in the final deployable artifact. The better approach is to simply use the Office 365 public CDN. The advantage of going with the public CDN is that you can just upload and deploy the SharePoint Framework solution, and during the installation, all the necessary files automatically become available, as long as the tenancy has the CDN enabled. I will be showing you both of these approaches, but we're going to use the Office 365 CDN for both. However, in one scenario I will control all the URLs, and in the second scenario we will have SharePoint Framework dynamically generate the URL for me. Let's dive into some demos.

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