Azure Application Gateways are HTTP/HTTPS load balancing solutions. Compared to Azure Load Balancers which are TCP/UDP load balancing solutions. Similar to Azure Load Balancers, Application Gateways can be configured with internet-facing IP addresses or with internal load balancer endpoints making them inaccessible via the internet. Application Gateways are ideal when you require some of the following features:

• Web-based traffic in any HTTP, HTTPS, or WebSocket protocols
• TLS/SSL offloading
• Built-in web application firewall
• Cookie affinity for sticky sessions

This Lab will take you through a scenario of deploying a web application in Azure, and creating and configuring an Application Gateway to load balance the web application's traffic. The Lab uses the Azure CLI to create and configure resources in the Lab environment.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this Lab, you will be able to:

• Use an Application Gateway to load balance application traffic
• Understand the use cases for an Application Gateway and when to use an Azure Load Balancer instead
• Familiarize with the Azure CLI to inspect, create, and update resources in a resource group
• Deploy applications to Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) using VMSS extensions

Lab Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Working at the command line in Linux
• Basic Azure concepts including resource groups, virtual networks, VMs, and the Azure CLI

Updates

September 23th, 2022 - Migrated lab to use Cloud Academy Web Terminal

February 24th, 2022 - Updated the Application Gateway CIDR address in the environment diagrams

May 20th, 2020 - Reverted some lab steps to account for a closed issue with the Azure CLI

May 5th, 2020 - Added a validation check function to check the work done in the lab

March 16th, 2020: Refactored some lab steps to get around an open issue with the Azure CLI