I know it's not the same as fully engineering a CDN into C5, but a simpler alternative could be to use Cloudflare for your site - I *think* a lot of the file serving/optimisation will then be handled automatically without need to change the default C5 setup.

I agree, but I remember reading old posts about there being some issues getting it setup and needing a dns record for a direct connection for admin. Is there an easy way to set this up?

I've not tried it myself. Bit of a hacky work-around, but depending on how often you need direct admin access could you possibly update your hosts file to resolve directly to your host server and bypass CloudFlare?

Since Concrete5 doesn't have a unique url for admin access like WP does (/wp-admin/) there needs to be some other things done to bypass the CDN for admin access. Cloudflare KB talks about creating a page rule for wp-admin.

Since Concrete5 doesn't work that way something different needs to be done, which is probably why the guide exists. I'd just like to see the tutorial for 5.6 updated for 5.7.

This is probably best to do with a different prefix in your uri : admin.xxx.net points directly andhttp://www.xxx.net points towards cloudflare.

But is it just as simple as that?

Guess I will test and see what happens.