Course Introduction
Load Balancers
Application Gateway
Azure Front Door
Web Application Firewall
Traffic Manager
Course Conclusion
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 Application Gateway! In this lesson, we are just going to touch on what Azure application Gateway is and what it offers.
Azure application Gateway is another load balancer offering that is used to load balance web traffic to web applications. While the Azure load balancer offering operates at the transport layer of the OSI model, and routes traffic based on source IP and port to a destination IP and port, the Azure application Gateway uses additional HTTP attributes to make routing decisions.
For example, when a request hits the application Gateway, the gateway can make routing decisions based on the URI path or based on host headers. Let’s assume, for example, that we have a website that hosts images and video. You could use application Gateway to route incoming traffic to the correct set of servers based on the URL. Incoming requests for a URL that includes /images can be routed to the servers, or backend pool, that hosts your images. Incoming requests for a URL that includes /video can be routed to the pool that hosts your videos. The pool that you route traffic to can consist of VM’s, a VM scale set, or even on-prem servers.
The image on your screen shows an example of how application Gateway can route traffic.
This is known as application layer routing and it happens at layer 7 of the OSI model.
The Azure application Gateway offers several features that allow you to load balance and manage traffic to web applications. Some key features include SSL termination, autoscaling, web application firewall, and zone redundancy.
SSL termination allows you to offload encryption and decryption to the gateway itself, rather than forcing the backend servers to handle it.
The autoscaling feature of application Gateway allows you to automatically scale up or down, based on traffic load. This feature is only supported by application Gateway standard V2.
The web application firewall is a service that offers centralized protection of web applications. The web application firewall, or WAF, protects such applications from many common exploits and vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross site scripting attacks, and many more.
By offering zone redundancy, the standard V2 application Gateway can be spanned across multiple availability zones. Because it can span multiple availability zones, you do not need to provision a separate application Gateway in each zone.
There are many other application Gateway features available. Visit the URL that you see on your screen for a complete list and details of each.
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.