Why .NET devs must update their infrastructure by Jan. 7

Microsoft has announced an “unexpected change” to the distribution of .NET installers and archives, urging developers to update their production and DevOps infrastructure by January 7, 2025, to avoid service disruption.

Richard Lander, a program manager on the .NET team, stated, “We expect that most users will not be directly affected, however, it is critical that you validate if you are affected and to watch for downtime or other kinds of breakage.”

This change arises from the hosting of some .NET binaries and installers on Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) domains ending in .azureedge[.]net—specifically, dotnetcli.azureedge.net and dotnetbuilds.azureedge.net, which are hosted on Edgio. Following Edgio’s bankruptcy, web infrastructure company Akamai acquired select assets from Edgio, with the Edgio platform scheduled to cease operations on January 15, 2025.

To mitigate the risk of unavailability of the .azureedge[.]net domains, Microsoft plans to migrate to Azure Front Door CDNs. If users take no action, Microsoft will automatically migrate these customers’ workloads by January 7, 2025. However, automatic migration will not apply to endpoints with *.vo.msecnd.net domains.

Users intending to migrate to Akamai or other CDN providers must set the Feature Flag DoNotForceMigrateEdgioCDNProfiles by January 7, 2025, to avoid automatic migration to Azure Front Door. Microsoft clarified, “Note you will have until January 14, 2025 to complete your migration to another CDN, but again Microsoft cannot guarantee your services will be available on the Edgio platform before this date.”

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Microsoft specified that all configuration changes to Azure CDN by Edgio profiles will be halted starting January 3, 2025. Users will not be able to update their CDN profile configuration, although services on Azure CDN from Edgio will continue to operate until migration or the shutdown of the Edgio platform on January 15, 2025. By applying the DoNotForceMigrateEdgioCDNProfiles feature flag before January 3, users can prevent their configuration from being frozen.

Although reliance on .azureedge[.]net and .azurefd[.]net is discouraged due to availability concerns, users may temporarily migrate to Azure Front Door while retaining their domains. Microsoft advises, “To ensure greater flexibility and avoid a single point of failure, it’s advisable to adopt a custom domain as soon as possible.”

In light of security risks associated with a potential acquisition of the azureedge[.]net domain by malicious actors, Microsoft has taken control of this domain. However, it has stated that the old domain names cannot be used to resolve to the new servers because “this option wasn’t being made available.”

Users are recommended to scan their codebases for references to azureedge[.]net and update them accordingly. They should update:

• dotnetcli.azureedge.net to builds.dotnet.microsoft.com
• dotnetcli.blob.core.windows.net to builds.dotnet.microsoft.com

Featured image credit: Kerem Gülen/Ideogram