What are the four “Main” Azure services that provide Load Balancing capabilities?
- Application Gateway
- Front Door
- Load Balancer
- Traffic Manager
Which of the four main load balancing services are HTTPS and which are non-HTTPS?
HTTPS: Front Door, Application Gateway
Non-HTTPs: Load Balancer, Traffic Manager
What type of load balancing does the Load Balancer service perform?
Layer 4 load balancing for all TCP and UDP protocols
What type of redundancy does the Load Balancer service provide?
Zone-redundant (across multiple availability zones)
What type of load balancing does the Traffic Manager service provide?
Layer 7, DNS-based, load balancing
What type of redundancy does the Traffic Manager service provide?
Regional
What type of load balancing does the Application Gateway service provide?
Layer 7 (HTTPS-only) load balancing with features such as SSL offloading
What type of redundancy does Application Gateway service provide?
Regional
What type of load balancing does the Front Door service provide?
Layer 7 (HTTPS - only) load balancing with features such as SSL offloading, path-based routing, caching, and fast-failover. Front Door can function much like a content delivery network.
What type of redundancy does the Front Door service provide?
Global
What tools can you use to determine which load balancing service you might need to use?
1) Load Balancing Decision Tree found in the Microsoft Architecture center
2) “Load balancing and content delivery” Page in the Azure Portal
What is the main drawback to Traffic Manager?
HA Fail-over is not as fast as Front Door
What are the key factors to deciding on what type of load balancer to use?
- Type of traffic: HTTPS? Private? Public?
- Scope: VMs? Containers? Regional?
- Availability: SLA
- Cost
- Features and Limitations
What are the three Load Balancer SKU types
- Basic (retired Sept 2025)
- Standard
- Gateway
What factors do a Load Balancer SKU affect?
- Backend Pool Size
- Backend Pool Endpoint types
- Health Probe types
- Health Probe behaviors
- Availability Zones
- Diagnostic metrics
- Default Security
- Multiple Front Ends (inbound and/or outbound)
What are the key features of Traffic Manager?
- Increase application availability: redundancy of backed endpoints
- Improve application performance: pick endpoints with low latency
- Service maintenance without downtime
- Combine hybrid applications
- Distribute traffic for complex deployments
How does Traffic Manager work?
It uses DNS to direct client requests with different traffic-routing methods to the desired backend endpoint.
What are some common Traffic Manager traffic-routing methods used for redirection?
- Priority
- Weighted (Random using weights)
- Performance (latency between client and backend endpoints)
- Geographic
- Nested (combination of those above)
Name the primary features of the Application Gateway service?
- Support for HTTP, HTTPS, and HTTP/2
- Web Application Firewall
- End-to-end Encryption
- Dynamic auto-scaling to meet traffic demand
- Connection draining for graceful backend connection termination
- Session stickiness
- Path and URL based routing
What are the five key elements to configuring Azure Application Gateway?
- Front-End IP address
- Listeners
- Request routing rules
- Backend Pools
- Health probes
What types of systems and PaaS services can be load balanced using Application Gateway?
- Virtual Machines
- VM Scale Sets
- On-Premises servers
- Azure App Services
What additional security feature can be enabled on Azure Application Gateway?
Web Application Firewall
What are the two types of routing methods used by Application Gateway?
- Path-based
- Multiple Sites
Describe the two types of routing methods used by Application Gateway?
Path-based routing - routes traffic to different backends based on the URL
Multiple Sites Routing - Uses multiple DNS names and listeners (for the same IP address) to direct traffic to different backend pools
