Understanding and Configuring Azure Front Door Services

Today we are going to discuss Azure Front Door Services, for which Microsoft announced general availability on April 4th, 2019.

We will try to understand the capabilities of Azure Front Door Services, and how does is it different from Azure Traffic Manager. We will have a quick demo on configuring Azure Front Door Services as well.

As I already told you that Azure Front Door Service became generally available on April 4th, 2019. This service can be compared to Azure Traffic Manager in a way that this also provides global HTTP load balancing to distribute traffic across different Azure regions, cloud providers or even with your on-premises.

It additionally provides a better performance, and instant failover when compared to traffic manager.

Users experience better performance than traffic manager because AFD uses Anycast, which provides lower latency, thereby providing higher performance

Also, along with providing global HTTP load balancing, enabling you to create applications that are globally distributed among different regions

One of the other reason is that it provides SSL Offload. This, in turn, takes that load off the Web Front Ends, which do not have to encrypt or decrypt the request and that overhead is now with AFD.

Finally, AFD provides WAF feature for your application to provide security from DDoS attacks

The way AFD works is that it caches the static content of your application, which it returns when a user tries to access the application without the need to do a server trip.

I told you that AFD uses Anycast. What is Anycast? It is a network addressing and routing methodology that tries to reach the destination using fewest hops amongst the other routes available. AFD also uses Split TCP that breaks connections into smaller pieces thus reducing latency and better performance.

The primary difference is in how Traffic Manager relies on DNS lookups to route customer requests to your backend services. If a service endpoint becomes unhealthy, a customer will need to wait for their cached DNS result to expire before failing over.

Below are some of the differences that I have listed for clarity.