Hello Friends,

Hope you all are doing good. In our last article we have discussed on how to configure NAT Gateway in Azure portal. Today in this article we will start with a new Azure network service Azure Front Door.



Tool Installation Articles :

1. Configure Azure Command Line Interface ( Azure CLI) On Windows
2. Configure PowerShell For Microsoft Azure Az Module On Windows

Previous Azure Series :

1. Learn Basics Of Azure Networking In 100 Hours
2. Learn Basics Of Microsoft Azure Storage services
3. Learn Basic Of Azure Active Directory And Azure Identity And Access Management
4. Azure DevOps – Learn at one place
5. Learn Basics Of Lift-And-Shift Migration To Azure

If you have missed our previous articles on Azure Networking, please check it in following links.

Part 1 – Basics of Azure Networking

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Part 23 – Azure Load Balancer -Configure Basic Load Balancer – 1

Part 24 – Azure Load Balancer – Configure Basic Load Balancer – 2

Part 25 – Azure Load Balancer – Configure Basic Load Balancer -3

Part 26 – Azure Load Balancer – Outbound Connectivity

Part 27 – Azure Load Balancer – Outbound Rule – Lab Exercise

Part 28 – Azure Virtual Network NAT (Network Address Translation)

Part 29 – Azure Virtual Network NAT Gateway

Part 30 – Configure Azure Virtual Network NAT Gateway In Azure Portal

Next Article : Part 32 – Azure Front Door 1 – Create And Configure Azure Front Door

Azure Load Balancing Services

Azure provides various load balancing services that we can use to distribute our workloads across multiple computing resources . Following are tose services, Each one has its own importance . We should choose right service in right use case.

• Azure Application Gateway

• Azure Load Balancer

• Azure Traffic Manager

• Azure Front Door

In our previous articles, we have covered the top 3 services. Today in this article we will cover the last one Azure Front Door.

Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door is a single global entry point which uses an Edge Network to create scalable web applications. The fully managed service can be configured as a load balancer for an application that runs on Azure. It operates at Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Layer 7, also known as the application layer. This means it manages network traffic related to application content. In short Azure Front Door provides Fast, reliable, and more secure cloud content delivery service with intelligent threat protection and again it is easy to set up, deploy, and manage.

Following are some features that improve performance and reliability.

• Split TCP-based Anycast Protocol :– Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology that tries to reach the destination using the fewest hops among the other routing methodology for accelerated performance.

• Health Probe Monitoring :-  health probe that our AFD can use to determine if our instance in back-end is healthy. If our instance fails its health probe enough times, it will stop sending traffic until it starts passing health probes again.

• URL Path-Based Routing :- URL Path Based Routing allows us to route traffic to back-end server pools based on URL Paths of the request.

• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Offloading And Certificate Management :- AFD provides SSL offloading but still provides end to end encryption. AFD takes the load of WFE which do not have to encrypt or decrypt the request.

• Integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF) @Edge :- web application filtering provides protection against DDoS attacks or malicious users at the edge without impacting backend services.

• Global HTTP Load Balancing :- This feature allows developers to build out geo-distributed services and lets Azure determine endpoint availability and intelligent routing to local, and available, endpoints.

• Cache Static Content :- AFD caches the static content and provides faster content without server round trips.

• Save Costs On Data Transfer :-AFD offers simple, easy, and transparent consumption pricing. Reduce bandwidth costs with no additional charges for transferring data from the Azure datacenter to the Azure Front Door edge location.

• Easily Access Azure Services and DevOps :- The AFD architecture integrates seamlessly with Azure services, including Azure App Service, Azure API Management, Azure Application Gateway, Azure Storage, Azure Monitor, Azure Cloud Services, and Azure Private Link.

• Support Of URL Redirect :- Using this feature we can redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS.

• Support Of URL Rewrite (custom forwarding path) :- AFD supports URL rewrite by configuring an optional Custom Forwarding Path to use when constructing the request to forward to the backend.

• Support Of Custom Domain :- AFD allow us to use our own custom domain if we would like our own domain name to be visible in our end-user request. 

• Support Of Session Affinity :- The cookie-based session affinity feature is useful when we want to keep a user session on the same backend.

• Hosting Multiple Sites :- Enables hosting of multiple websites for efficient application infrastructure.

Azure Front Door Pricing Options

for more information on pricing or to request a price quote. See Explore pricing options about Azure pricing.

With the above information, I am concluding this article. I hope this is informative to you. Please let me know if I missed anything important or if my understanding is not up to the mark.

Next Article : Part 32 – Azure Front Door 1 – Create And Configure Azure Front Door

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