How Azion Cuts Cloud Bills — Performance, Compression, and Distributed Architecture That Slash Egress

Egress is the hidden cloud tax. Move compute and caching closer to users, reduce origin bytes and requests, and you immediately shrink cloud bills while improving user experience.

This article synthesizes benchmarks, enterprise transformations, and practical patterns to show how Azion’s Web Platform enables substantial reductions in origin egress, latency, and observability spend — often in the 50–75% range.

Opening: Start With The Right Axis

Most cloud-cost conversations begin with compute and storage. They should begin with egress. Every byte you push from origin to the public internet becomes a recurring monthly bill. In regions with expensive transit (LATAM, parts of APAC), egress often becomes the fastest-growing line item on a cloud invoice.

Across dozens of deployments, a repeated pattern emerges: introduce local points of presence (POPs), serve cacheable content and short-lived dynamic fragments through a distributed network, filter noisy traffic, and compress payloads. Typical outcomes: 60–90% reductions in origin egress; 30–80% latency improvements; and measurable uplifts in usage and revenue.

The rest of this piece explains how and why — with actionable patterns and runnable pseudocode you can use as a starting point.

Why Egress is The Lever That Matters

Public cloud pricing spreadsheets make the cost drivers clear:

• Internet egress is billed per-GB and per-region (typically $0.02–$0.09/GB depending on tier and geography).
• Inter-region transfers add further per-GB charges.
• Gateway, load-balancer, and per-request API charges can add significant cost in chatty architectures.

Because egress is proportional to bytes and traffic geography, reducing bytes leaving the origin compounds into large monthly savings. For a 100 TB/month application, a 70% reduction in origin egress can save tens of thousands of dollars monthly — and those savings scale with usage.

Observed Impact Ranges (real deployments & benchmarks)

• Origin egress reduction: 60–90% using multi-layer caching, compression, and request filtering.
• Cache-hit ratios: uplift from 20–40% to 70–95% with microcaching and smart TTLs.
• Latency reduction: 30–80% regionally when combining local POPs and HTTP/3.
• Bandwidth savings from compression: 30–70% on text-heavy payloads with Brotli/Gzip.
• Observability intake reduction: 30–60% via distributed sampling, aggregation, and pre-filtering.

These ranges are drawn from anonymized customer transformations, platform benchmarks, and public research. Actual results depend on traffic mix, payload types, and cacheability.

A Public Transformation Story

To illustrate the structural impact of moving logic, caching, and content to a distributed infrastructure, consider a public case from Dafiti — one of Latin America’s largest fashion e-commerce platforms.

Dafiti serves over 7.7 million active customers across Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, with multibillion-real annual revenue and a business heavily dependent on fast page loads, image-rich catalogs, and high mobile usage. As online shopping surged during the pandemic, performance and scalability became decisive competitive factors.

Challenge

Dafiti relied on a global CDN vendor until 2020. Despite scale, the legacy solution struggled with:

• slow load times across South America (TTFB, throughput, LCP degradation)
• high origin egress due to limited caching efficiency
• expensive data-transfer consumption
• the need to process millions of high-resolution product images without harming UX

With customer experience being a primary conversion driver in Brazil (89%), Colombia (84%), and Argentina (77%), improving performance and reducing costs became a strategic priority.

Actions taken

Dafiti migrated to Azion’s Web Platform, built on 100+ distributed locations with a focus on performance, availability, and cost efficiency. Through a structured proof of concept and full rollout, Dafiti adopted:

• Application Acceleration with multi-layer caching
• Tiered Cache to reduce origin egress
• Image Processor for real-time optimization across 17+ million images
• Functions to execute business logic, personalization, and A/B tests close to users
• Distributed delivery across all LATAM domains (AR, BR, CL, CO)

Results

Within the first rollout phase, Dafiti observed:

• 86% faster load time vs. their legacy CDN (18.33s → 2.44s)
• 550 TB of data transfer offloaded from origin in a single month
• 45% reduction in cloud data-transfer costs
• 75% smaller image payloads on average
• 40+ applications created in the first two months, improving UX across web and mobile
• better scalability and resilience during regional traffic peaks

Business impact

These gains directly supported Dafiti’s mission to deliver a smooth, visually rich shopping experience across South America — increasing revenue potential, strengthening competitive position, and reducing infrastructure spend simultaneously.

This public transformation demonstrates the same pattern seen across modern deployments: when compute, caching, and optimization shift to a distributed infrastructure, organizations simultaneously reduce origin egress, improve latency, and shrink cloud bills — often dramatically.

What Made These Results Possible: Core Technical Patterns

Distributed architectures change where work and bytes live. The following mechanisms are repeatable levers:

Core mechanisms

• Cache layering and microcaching: long TTLs for immutable assets (images, segments), adaptive TTLs for dynamic pieces, and stale-while-revalidate to mask origin flaps.
• Compute offload: run lightweight logic (auth, personalization, manifest assembly) across distributed nodes so many requests never touch the origin.
• Compression and protocols: Brotli for text-heavy payloads and HTTP/3 for lower handshake latency.
• Bot filtering & API shielding: block or rate-limit abusive traffic before incurring origin egress.
• Observability filtering: sample, aggregate, and forward only essential telemetry to central storage.

Microcaching patterns

• Use sub-minute TTLs for dynamic content that’s expensive to compute but safe to cache briefly (e.g., portfolio snapshots).
• Group cache keys by user-permission or device variant to keep hit rates high and avoid leaking data.
• Combine s-maxage with stale-while-revalidate to maintain UX during origin slowdowns.

Engineering cautions

• Not all endpoints are cacheable; personalized or single-writer flows remain origin-bound.
• Respect consistency and data sovereignty when selecting where to process or store data.
• Keep distributed logic simple and testable to reduce debugging and security surface.
• Measure before you change: accurate baselines for egress, cache hits, latency, and telemetry are essential.

Code: Microcaching + Brotli-Aware Fetch

Notes on the platform model: the examples below are pseudocode aligned with Service Worker / Function style APIs (Azion Functions and similar runtimes). They are intended to be adapted to your platform’s specific SDK.

// Edge function: microcache + origin fetch that advertises accept-encoding
export default async function handler(request, event) {
  const auth = request.headers.get('authorization') || '';
  const userHash = hash(auth); // keep this deterministic and privacy-safe
  const cacheKey = `portfolio:${userHash}`;

  // Attempt to serve from edge cache
  const cached = await caches.default.match(cacheKey);
  if (cached) {
    // Return cached response (preserves headers set at store time)
    return cached.clone();
  }

  // Fetch from origin, advertise Brotli/Gzip support
  const originResp = await fetch(`${ORIGIN}/portfolio`, {
    headers: { 'authorization': auth, 'accept-encoding': 'br, gzip, deflate' }
  });

  // Read origin response body
  const body = await originResp.arrayBuffer();

  // Construct a response with Cache-Control directives for edge
  const response = new Response(body, {
    status: originResp.status,
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': originResp.headers.get('content-type') || 'application/json',
      // s-maxage for edge caches; stale-while-revalidate to smooth UX
      'Cache-Control': 's-maxage=30, stale-while-revalidate=60'
    }
  });

  // Write to edge cache non-blocking
  event.waitUntil(caches.default.put(cacheKey, response.clone()));
  return response;
}

Implementation notes for compression: do not manually set Content-Encoding unless you are actually compressing the payload on the edge; instead, advertise Accept-Encoding to origin and rely on the edge platform’s integrated compression or perform explicit compression inside the function if the runtime allows it.

Code: manifest assembly at the edge (device-aware)

// Pseudocode: assemble a video manifest variant per device at the edge
export default async function handleRequest(request, event) {
  const ua = request.headers.get('user-agent') || '';
  const device = /Mobile|Android|iPhone/i.test(ua) ? 'mobile' : 'desktop';
  const videoId = /* extract param from URL or route */ extractVideoId(request);
  const manifestKey = `/manifests/${device}/${videoId}.json`;

  const cached = await caches.default.match(manifestKey);
  if (cached) return cached.clone();

  const baseResp = await fetch(`${ORIGIN}/base-manifest/${videoId}`);
  const data = await baseResp.json();

  // Tailor profile to device
  data.profile = device === 'mobile' ? data.profileMobile : data.profileDesktop;

  const body = JSON.stringify(data);
  const response = new Response(body, {
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
      'Cache-Control': 's-maxage=30'
    }
  });

  event.waitUntil(caches.default.put(manifestKey, response.clone()));
  return response;
}

These examples are intentionally minimal; in production you should add error handling, cache key normalization, and observability hooks (edge metrics) so you can measure hit ratios and egress savings.

Architecture Comparison: Centralized vs Edge-Native

FinOps, Telemetry and Automation: Closing The Loop

Distributed telemetry enables smarter cost policies:

• Real-time metrics can trigger automated rules (e.g., increase TTLs, throttle endpoints, enforce rate limits when egress spikes).
• Sampling and aggregation across the distributed network cut ingestion costs while preserving signal.
• Combine deployment gates with budget alerts to catch regressions early.

To understand where we’re going, it’s worth looking at where we came from.

A 30-day Pilot Checklist (practical)

1. Identify your top 3 origin-heavy endpoints (by bytes and requests).
2. Capture baseline metrics for 30 days: origin egress (GB), origin requests, cache-hit ratio, median/p95 latency, telemetry volume and cost.
3. Implement edge-based microcaching and one edge function (auth, manifest assembly, or portfolio snapshot).
4. Enable Brotli and HTTP/3 at the edge.
5. Add edge bot filtering / API shielding for noisy endpoints.
6. Run A/B measurement for at least 2 weeks and compare costs and UX metrics.
7. Extend to top 10 endpoints and integrate automated FinOps rules.

Business Implications and Market Reset

A distributed-native architecture is more than a technical optimization — it’s a structural shift in cloud economics.
Instead of negotiating for cheaper inter-region transit, companies can avoid those bytes entirely.

• Product teams ship faster with better UX (local latencies).
• Security teams block abuse before it becomes a bill.
• Finance gains predictable, smaller egress line items.

For enterprises in cost-sensitive regions (LATAM, APAC), this structural advantage translates into lower unit costs per active user and greater pricing flexibility.