If your hostnames already serve live traffic, a single CNAME change moves every user at once, with no way to stage the risk or limit the blast radius of a bad configuration. Phase your rollout to ensure uninterrupted service.

You should start with Point traffic to Akamai. Make sure you meet that topic's prerequisites as well as the ones below. Instead of adding all your CNAME records in a single change, follow the staged steps here.

Before you begin

• Expect origin load spikes. Every request is a cache miss until the edge cache warms up. Either pre-fetch your most requested URLs or confirm your origin can absorb the misses at full traffic volume.
• If applicable, review HSTS policies. If you serve HSTS with a long max-age or are on the preload list, users cannot bypass certificate errors and rollback will not clear browser enforcement.
• If you’re migrating from another CDN, confirm the origin in your delivery configuration is your true origin and not the other CDN. Port all edge logic like redirects, cache keys, custom headers, edge compute before moving traffic. Keep valid certificates on both providers until cutover is complete.

How to

1. Add a parallel service hostname, for example akamai.example.com, to your configuration and point only that record at your edge hostname. This gives you real traffic, real certificates, and real edge behavior without touching production records.
2. Move production traffic in stages. Start with your lowest-traffic service hostname, or use weighted DNS records to shift 1%, then 10%, then 50%, then all of it, checking error rates and origin load at each step.

Next steps

Once all traffic routes through Akamai, complete the verification in Point traffic to Akamai and raise your TTL as described in Lower your DNS Time to Live (TTL). If you need to reverse the cutover at any stage, see Back out of edge network.