Azure Load Balancing is a service provided by Microsoft Azure to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers. It ensures that no single server becomes overwhelmed with too much traffic, improving the availability and reliability of your applications. Azure offers different types of load balancing services tailored to various needs.
Azure Load Balancer
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 (Transport Layer) load balancer. It distributes incoming traffic based on the IP address and port. It is ideal for load balancing traffic inside a virtual network (internal load balancer) or from the internet to your virtual machines (public load balancer). Key features include:
High Availability: Ensures your application is available by distributing traffic across multiple virtual machines.
Scalability: Automatically scales to handle increasing traffic loads.
Health Monitoring: Regularly checks the health of your application instances and only sends traffic to healthy ones.
Low Latency: Offers low-latency performance with high throughput.
Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway is a Layer 7 (Application Layer) load balancer. It is designed for web applications and can make routing decisions based on the content of the HTTP request. Key features include:
Web Application Firewall (WAF): Provides protection against common web vulnerabilities.
SSL Termination: Decrypts SSL traffic at the gateway, reducing the load on your web servers.
URL-based Routing: Routes traffic based on URL paths, enabling you to direct different requests to different back-end pools.
Session Affinity: Ensures that requests from the same client are always routed to the same server.
Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic routing service. It uses DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate endpoint based on the chosen traffic-routing method. Key features include:
Geographic Routing: Directs users to the closest regional endpoint, improving performance and compliance.
Priority Routing: Routes traffic to primary endpoints, with failover to backup endpoints in case of failure.
Weighted Routing: Distributes traffic based on assigned weights, useful for load testing or gradual rollouts.
Performance Routing: Routes traffic to the lowest latency endpoint, optimizing user experience.
Summary
Azure Load Balancer: Distributes traffic at the network level (Layer 4), ideal for internal and internet-facing applications.
Azure Application Gateway: Distributes traffic at the application level (Layer 7), ideal for web applications with features like WAF, SSL termination, and URL-based routing.
Azure Traffic Manager: DNS-based traffic routing, directing traffic to the best endpoint based on geographic, priority, weighted, or performance criteria.
These services together provide a comprehensive set of tools for ensuring high availability, scalability, and performance of your applications in Azure.
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