Brotli is an open-source, lossless data compression algorithm that has a higher compression rate than gzip. With Brotli Support enabled, the CDN can return Brotli-compressed assets from your origin and cache them on the edge servers. If a requesting client (browser) doesn't support Brotli, the ​Akamai​ servers respond with non-Brotli resources.

How it works

With Brotli Support enabled, the CDN serves compressed resources to requesting clients, but these resources must already be Brotli compressed on your origin.

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Brotli Support doesn't compress resources within the ​Akamai​ CDN in real-time. You need to set up Brotli compression separately on your origin.

​Akamai​ edge servers send Brotli-compressed content to clients accepting the Brotli algorithm if either of these conditions are met:

• if a request from a client that accepts Brotli-compression (the Accept-encoding header contains the br value) reaches the edge server first OR
• if there's a Brotli-compressed content in their cache already.

If the client reaching the CDN accepts the Brotli algorithm but a gzip-compressed content is already cached on the ​Akamai​ edge server, the gzip resource is served to save time and bandwidth. This might mean you need to wait until the time-to-live (TTL) expires on the gzip content in cache to be able to get non-gzip files. Once a Brotli-compressed asset is in cache, the CDN serves it to clients that support Brotli.

The first request that reaches a CDN server after its cache expires determines whether this server will be able to deliver either Brotli- and gzip-compressed files OR gzip only until the next TTL expires.

You can contact Akamai Professional Services for help configuring additional options for this behavior with advanced metadata.