Discussions

I thought switching our CDN would be, you know… a weekend project. Ha. Biggest lie I’ve told myself since “I’ll just check Slack for five minutes.”

The plan sounded solid. Move from our old provider to one with better edge locations, better caching rules, lower latency for our Asia users. Easy, right? Copy some configs, point the DNS, grab a coffee. But nope turns out “copying configs” was actually “rewriting half the logic in ways that made me question my career choices.”

The first big “oh crap” moment? Realizing the new CDN didn’t support the same rule syntax. Some things mapped fine, others… not at all. Redirect rules that worked perfectly before suddenly looped infinitely, and our static assets started returning 404s from random regions.

We also underestimated TTL behavior. Our old setup respected our origin headers; the new one decided to ignore them unless we specifically forced them in every single policy. Users kept seeing outdated content, and one customer in Singapore actually sent me a screenshot from two weeks ago.

And the logging my god, the logging. I went from having clear origin vs. edge reports to a wall of JSON blobs with cryptic field names. It’s like the engineers designing it thought, “Let’s make them feel like they’re decoding the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

Somewhere in between frantically reading docs and hitting rollback twice, I found myself thinking about how this felt exactly like when I was in school and I needed nursing assignments help because a paper had so many moving parts and weird requirements I couldn’t keep track. Different field, same “where do I even start” energy.

The silver lining? I did learn more about cache hierarchies and custom edge logic in one horrible week than I had in the last year. Plus, we’re now running smoother, with lower costs and better control over content delivery. Would I do it again? Uh… maybe after a vacation.

If anyone here’s planning a CDN migration plan way more time than you think, and test every rule in staging like your life depends on it. Because during the cutover… it kinda does.