Can I use a CDN or proxy in front of Cloudinary?

When using Cloudinary, media assets are delivered by multiple CDN providers automatically.

For self-service customers, delivery is handled via Akamai, Fastly, or Cloudflare depending on the region of the clients. Which CDN(s) serve traffic can change periodically to optimize performance and availability.

For contracted enterprise customers, Cloudinary's Multi-CDN solution can optionally be used and includes dynamic switching between CDNs depending on real-time performance and availability monitoring across users' locations.

Many Cloudinary features are provided and enhanced by our integration with our CDN partners, including key optimization and delivery workflows.

Some features are unavailable or require significant development work to enable or approximate if a third-party CDN or proxy receives requests before Cloudinary's CDNs, including:

1. Automatically delivery of WebP and other modern formats to supported browsers via the automatic format transformation. For images, this can save more than 30% file size and bandwidth usage compared to serving JPEG to all users.
2. Automatic invalidations for overwritten or deleted assets - with your CDN in front, you will have to take care of invalidations yourself, instead of having them sent automatically by our Media Library or in response to your API calls.
3. Advanced SEO features - such as SEO-friendly media asset URLs which rely on configuration in our CDNs, in addition to the standard delivery URL syntax
4. Delivery reports and insights - these will be significantly less effective since we will receive only a small percentage of the end-user requests or your assets if another CDN is responding to much of the traffic.

Our standard pricing for all plans includes delivery via CDN distributions that are managed by Cloudinary. However, contracted enterprise customers have the option to use their own CDN or proxy layer instead if the above trade-offs are acceptable and subject to different pricing, including different usage calculations for metrics related to asset delivery: bandwidth, video seconds, image impressions.

If this is something you are considering, please reach out to our account management team who can provide details about changing your contract's pricing and adding the necessary implementation package and configuration.