Microsoft Azure offers many global and regional load balancers which can be used within your infra cloud design architecture to manager the traffic load and auto scale the infra.
We can see the below comparative features which will be helpful in taking the decision what can be the best suitable component for your design architecture with Azure Traffic Manager, App Gateway, Front Door and Load Balancer.
| List of Features | Azure Traffic Manager | Azure Application Gateway | Azure Front Door | Azure Load Balancer |
| Works at OSI Layer | 7 | 7 | 7 | 4 |
| Health Probes | HTTP/HTTPS/TCP | HTTP/HTTPS | HTTP/HTTPS | TCP/HTTP |
| SKU’s | – | Basic/Standard | – | Basic/Standard |
| Load Balancing | Global | Regional | Global | Global |
| Work’s at | VMs | Any IP Address | DNS Name | – |
| TCP & UDP | DNS | HTTP/HTTPS/HTTP2/WS | HTTP/HTTPS/HTTP2/TP2 | TCP & UDP |
| Sticky Sessions | Supported | Supported | Supported | Supported |
| Traffic Control | – | NSG | – | NSG |
| WAF | _ | WAF | WAF | – |
Load Balancer
A device sits between the end user and the cloud server group and acts as an invisible facilitator to distribute set of tasks to set of resource and making sure overall processing more efficient.
Azure Traffic Manager
A DNS based traffic load balancer to auto switch to the new end points for load balancing. Azure Traffic Manager Services allows to distribute traffic to public facing applications across the globe Azure regions.
Traffic manager also provides public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.
The Traffic manager usage DNS to direct client requests to the appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method. Traffic Manager also provides health monitoring for every endpoint.
For more details and information please reach out to the original Microsoft articles:
- How Traffic Manager Works
- Traffic Manager FAQs
- Traffic Manager profiles
- Traffic Manager Endpoints
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