To go live and deliver your content to end users, point your traffic to Akamai at the DNS level. This means updating your CNAME record to point your service hostnames to an assigned Akamai edge hostname. For more details on edge traffic routing, see How content delivery works.

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Plan your cutover before you change any records. Lowering your DNS TTL is what makes both a fast cutover and a fast rollback possible. Before updating your CNAME, wait for at least one full duration of your previous TTL setting so legacy cached records expire globally.

If your hostnames already serve production traffic, see Cut over a site with existing traffic.

Before you begin

Before enabling traffic for you site through Akamai edge network, verify these prerequisites:

• Network activation: Your production environment and routed service hostname sets are active on Akamai production network. See How activation works for more details.
• Edge hostname readiness: Your edge hostname assignment is configured with appropriate security level. Changing the edge hostname configuration later requires a second DNS change.
• TLS certificate deployment: Certificates for your service hostnames are validated and deployed to the production network. If you point traffic at an edge hostname before the certificate is deployed, HTTPS requests fail.
• Origin preparation: Akamai edge IPs are allowed through your firewall, and you updated anything that reads the client IP, such as allow lists, rate limits, geo logic, access logs, to read True-Client-IP instead. After cutover, your origin sees edge IPs.
• DNS TTL lowered in advance: The TTL on the records you plan to change is lowered to 300 seconds or less at least one full period of your current TTL ahead of cutover. Wait out at least one full old-TTL period before cutover so recursive DNS resolvers worldwide expire old records and adopt the short TTL. Without lowering TTL first, global traffic switchover will trickle unpredictably until legacy cached records expire, and any necessary rollback will take time to propagate globally. For more details, see Lower your DNS TTL.
• Zone apex handling: Check how your DNS provider handles the zone apex. You can't point an apex record such as example.com at a CNAME. Make sure you redirect the apex to www, or move the zone to Edge DNS.

How to

1. Navigate to the Service hostnames tab.
2. Select your service hostname set and click the traffic redirection banner.
3. Use the provided instructions to add CNAME records in your DNS management system, pointing your service hostnames to the assigned edge hostnames.
4. Wait the lowered TTL for the CNAME update to propagate globally.

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   Currently, Delivery Manager doesn't automatically confirm or display that the DNS CNAME record is live. As a temporary workaround, manually verify that your DNS CNAME record is active and resolving outside of Delivery Manager using command-line DNS tools (such as dig or nslookup) or an external DNS lookup service.

5. Verify that traffic is being served correctly. Check your response headers for edge cache status, then confirm in reporting that requests are arriving, cache hit ratio is rising, error rates are flat, and origin traffic has dropped by the amount you expect.
6. Keep the short TTL in place for as long as you want a fast rollback available. See Back out of edge network. Once traffic is routing stably through Akamai and you've finished verifying it, raise the TTL on your service hostname records back to your standard value to reduce query volume against your authoritative DNS.