The Edge Redirector Cloudlet helps you more efficiently manage large numbers of redirects. By executing redirects at the Akamai edge, you can reduce round trips to the origin and offload hits from your origin infrastructure.

Workflow

Traditionally, a redirect request travels to your origin to retrieve the new URL.

For web properties delivered using Akamai, Edge Redirector eliminates the need to send a redirect request to the origin. It handles the redirect at the edge, saving a round-trip to the origin and any resulting hits against your infrastructure.

Here's how Edge Redirector works:
ER_workflow

Use Case: Managing 1000s of redirect rules

With Edge Redirector, you can support thousands of redirects for a single property. To effectively manage a large number of rules, you can group your redirects by some characteristic of the input, such as hostname, or URL path.

Once you determine your rule groupings, you need to create separate policies for each redirect group and configure rules in Property Manager to select which requests should be sent to which Cloudlet policy.

For example, you could:

Create an Edge Redirector policy called Products.
Create a Property Manager rule that filters on any request that includes /products/*in the URL path.
Add an Edge Redirector behavior under this rule that uses the "Products" Edge Redirector policy.
Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each additional redirect grouping, like /search/*.

Support for URLs with special characters

If you want to redirect from a URL that includes special characters, like umlauts, you must enter URL-encoded values for the source URL path.

Types of Edge Redirector roles

The Edge Redirector Cloudlet comes with its own roles. These roles are in addition to the standard Cloudlets roles. Edge Redirector includes these roles because of the basic and advanced editor functionality included on the Create a Rule screen.

The following are the types of Edge Redirector roles that are currently available.

Role	Provides access to...
Edge Redirector Cloudlets Administrator	administrative-level functions for Edge Redirector, which includes both editing and activation. This role has the same permission levels as CloudletName Admin.
Edge Redirector Advanced Editor	advanced editing functions within Edge Redirector, which includes the ability to set up match criteria for an Edge Redirector rule.
Edge Redirector Cloudlet Business Editor	basic editing functions within Edge Redirector. This role is limited to setting up the incoming URL, the redirect URL, and the HTTP status code (either 301 or 302). You cannot activate a Cloudlets policy version with this role.

To learn more about Cloudlets basics, see:
How Cloudlets work
Cloudlets terminology
Property and Cloudlet policy considerations