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DEMO: Creating a Traffic Manager Profile
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Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
1h 23m
Students
6605
Ratings
4.8/5
Description

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.

Transcript

Welcome back. What we're going to do in this demonstration here is deploy a Traffic Manager profile. The process is going to be pretty straightforward. We're going to deploy the profile, and then we're going to add two backend endpoints to that profile. The endpoints will be two web apps that I've deployed in Microsoft Azure.

On the screen here, you can see I'm logged in to my Azure portal, as my admin. And I'm sitting in the LB Lab resource group. We have two web apps deployed here, Blue Widget 1 and Blue Widget 2 is going to live in the other research group of LB Lab 2. So these will be the end points.

So let's bounce back to LB Lab. Now to begin the process, we'll go into the hamburger here and we'll create a resource. And what we'll do here is we'll search for Traffic Manager. And you can see here Traffic Manager profile shows up in the list, so we'll go ahead and begin the process here.

Now when we create our Traffic Manager profile, we need to give it a unique name across the Azure landscape. We need to specify the routing method that we talked about earlier, the subscription, and the resource group we want to deploy it into. When we create our profile, the name we use here is going to append the trafficmanager.net domain name. So that's why this needs to be unique.

So what we'll do here is we'll try to call this MyBWApp. So mybwapp.trafficmanager.net will be the URL that we use to hit the web applications that are sitting behind the Traffic Manager profile. In the drop-down here for routing method, we have the different routing methods we talked about. Performance, weighted, priority, the geographic multi-value and subnet. We'll leave this set to performance, we'll deploy into the lab subscription, and we will deploy into LB Lab.

Now you'll notice the resource group location grays out based on the resource group that we select. So we'll go ahead and create the profile. We can see our deployment has succeeded, so we'll go to our resource here. And we now have My BW App Traffic Manager profile.

Now at this point, what we're going to do is create the endpoints. We'll create a primary endpoint that points to our app 1, and then a secondary that points to app 2. So we'll go ahead, to do this under Settings here we select Endpoints, and we can see we have no endpoints currently created, so we'll go ahead and add the first one. And you can see here there's not too much information we need to provide.

In the Type drop-down here, we need to tell Azure what kind of endpoint we're going to add, whether it's an Azure endpoint, an external endpoint, or a nested endpoint. Since our endpoints are going to be a web app, we'll select Azure Endpoint. And then we need to give our endpoint a name here, so I'll just call it Endpoint 1.

Now in the target resource type, you can see we have a couple of different options here. Cloud service, app service, App Service Slot, and Public IP. Since we are using App Service as our endpoints, it stands to reason that we deploy App Service as our target resource type. And then once we do that, the Target Resource dropdown allows us to select our app service. We can see we have one in the central US and one in east US. So we'll select the blue widget 1 for a primary endpoint here.

Now, if we hover over custom header settings here, what this does is allow us to configure custom headers for the app. We don't need any custom headers for our applications here, so we'll leave this box alone. Now we could add our endpoint in a disabled state by checking the Disabled box, but we'll add this in in an active state. And to do that, we simply click the Add button.

To add the second endpoint, we just repeat the process. We go ahead and add. We'll select the Azure endpoint, We'll call this Endpoint 2. We'll select the app service, and then we'll choose Blue Widget 2 this time. Now to test our Traffic Manager, if we bounce out to Overview here, we can copy the URL, which is the DNS name for our Traffic Manager. And to get to our Traffic Manager, we're going to hit http://mybwapp.trafficmanager.net.

Let's open up an Incognito window here, and there you go. So Traffic Manager is now going to send me to the closest iteration of our web app. In my case here, I have an east US deployment and a central US deployment. Me personally, I'm located in the eastern part of the United States.

So what Traffic Manager will do is look at where the request for the application is coming from and send me to the closest iteration of that web app based on the DNS request. And that's pretty much it. That is how you deploy and configure a Traffic Manager profile.

About the Author
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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.