This course will provide you with a foundational understanding of the different ways you can load balance traffic in Microsoft Azure. It includes guided walk-throughs from the Azure platform to give you a practical understanding of how to implement load balancing in your Azure environments.
We start by introducing the different types of load balancers, their components, and their use cases. You'll learn how to deploy a load balancer on Azure. Then we'll dive into Application Gateway and you'll learn about its features and components. You'll also learn about Azure Front Door and how to create a Front Door instance.
We'll then take a look at Web Application Firewall, when it's used, and how to use it in conjunction with Application Gateway, Azure Front Door, and Azure CDN. Finally, you'll learn about Traffic Manager, how it works, and when to use it, as well as how to create a Traffic Manager profile.
Learning Objectives
- Get a solid understanding of load balancing on Azure
- Deploy a load balancer
- Understand the features and components of Application Gateway and how to deploy it
- Learn about Azure Front Door and how to create a Front Door instance
- Learn about Web Application Firewall and how to deploy it on Application Gateway
- Learn how to use Traffic Manager and how to create a Traffic Manager profile
Intended Audience
This course is intended for those who wish to learn about the different ways of performing load balancing in Azure.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should have a basic understanding of the Azure platform.
Hello and welcome to Azure Front Door. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at what Azure Front Door is, and what it offers.
Azure Front Door is a service offering that is delivered from the edge of Microsoft’s global network. This service offers global load balancing for applications and even microservices. With Azure Front Door, you can fail over such apps and microservices across different regions or even different clouds. You can use it to define, manage, and monitor global routing for your web traffic. It also provides high availability.
Key features and benefits of Azure Front Door include improved application performance, increased availability, URL-based routing, session affinity, and much, much more.
Improved app performance is attained through the use of split TCP-based anycast protocol. What this does is ensure that users of an application connect to the nearest point of presence to them. This speeds access and reduces latency.
Increased availability is made possible with smart health probes. These smart health probes monitor the backend resources for latency and availability. When a backend resource goes down, the health probes facilitate a quick failover to remaining backend resources.
The URL-based routing that Front Door offers allows you to route traffic to backend pools based on the URL paths of the requests. For example, requests for a URL like http://www.bluewidgetcorp.com/video could be configured to go to resources hosting videos, while a URL like http://www.bluewidgetcorp.com/images could be configured to go to resources hosting images.
The cookie-based session affinity that Front Door offers can be used to ensure that a specific user session remains on the same backend for the duration of the session.
There are also many other features and benefits of Front Door, including things like TLS termination, custom domain support, URL redirection, and others.
For a complete list of Azure Front Door features and benefits, along with an explanation of each, visit the URL that you see on your screen.
Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.
In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.
In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.