Azure Front Door Service

Azure Front Door Service is Microsoft's highly available and scalable web application acceleration platform and global HTTP(s) load balancer.

It provides built-in DDoS protection and application layer security and caching. Front Door enables you to build applications that maximize and automate high-availability and performance for your end-users.

Use Front Door with Azure services including Web/Mobile Apps, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines – or combine it with on-premises services for hybrid deployments and smooth cloud migration.

If you are confused between Azure load balancer, Application gateway and other load balancing options available in azure then have a look at this detail document(link). https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/load-balancing-overview

Along with the above table I strongly recommend you go to decision tree created in the above link and it will clarify why we have all the options and when to use which one.

In this lab we are going to create 2 instances of the same identical web application and one will be deployed on East US region and other on West Europe region. Both the web application instances run in Active/Active mode, that is, either of them can take traffic at any time unlike an Active/Stand-By configuration where one acts as a failover.

Sign in to Azure portal and Click on Create Resource to create a new Web App

Provide following details for the New web App. Please note we are going to create only one resource group for this practice lab. If you want you can create different resource groups.

After providing these values kindly click on review and create.

This deployment of the web app will take some time. Meanwhile you can create another webapp in the west Europe region by following similar steps with following details.

Once both the apps are created make sure your resource group look like this.

Now it’s a time to create Azure Front Door for these 2 applications

Click on create resource and choose Azure front door.

Notice we are choosing new location and new resource group for Azure front Door. Our applications are in East US and West Europe region and now Azure front door will be in Central US region. After providing following details click on configuration.

Click on the + icon in configuration screen to create front end.

Once this step is done your frontend will be visible in that card and now it’s a time to click on next card for backend pool

 On the Add backend pool blade give a unique name for your backend pool and then click on Add a backend

Configure both the app services like following to add 2 backend.

Once you are done with both you will get like this.

Leave all the other settings to by default and optionally you can configure health probe and load balancing settings. In our case we are keeping it default which will also work fine.

Click on Add button and you will get backend pool in the second card. Now it’s a time to configure last card which is routing rules.

Lastly, click the '+' icon on Routing rules card to configure a routing rule. This is needed to map your frontend host to the backend pool, which basically is configuring that if a request comes to marutifrontend.azurefd.net, then forward it to the backend pool myBackendPool.

just provide a name as locationrule and click on Add button at the bottom.

On the review and create page of the azure front door click on create to deploy this full configuration.

Once deployment is done click on this URL to access frontend host.

Your request will automatically get routed to the nearest backend to you from the specified backends in the backend pool

View Front Door handle application failover

If you want to test Front Door's instant global failover in action, you can go to one of the web sites you created and stop it. Based on the Health Probe setting defined for the backend pool, we will instantly fail over the traffic to the other web site deployment. You can also test behavior, by disabling the backend in the backend pool configuration for your Front Door.

You can customize this settings and change it anytime by clicking on Front door designer.

If you are interested in Azure Networking concepts and willing to attend our one of MentorConnect online Virtual training then kindly contact us here. contact-us