Traffic Manager vs Front Door – Cloud Avenue

The term load balancing refers to the distribution of workloads across multiple computing resources. Load balancing aims to optimize resource use, maximize throughput, minimize response time, and avoid overloading any single resource. It can also improve availability by sharing a workload across redundant computing resources.

Azure provides various load balancing services that you can use to distribute your workloads across multiple computing resources – Application Gateway, Front Door, Load Balancer, and Traffic Manager.

Azure provides various services to manage network traffic and load balancing. These services are primary of two categories:

1. Global load-balancing services distributes the traffic across multiple regions and multiple clouds (or on-premise). These services routes the traffic to the closest service and ensures the high availability and high performance by keeping the track of the system health and user locations.
2. Regional load-balancing services distributes traffic within a virtual network or the endpoints within a region.

Azure Traffic Manager

It uses DNS to redirect requests to an appropriate geographical location endpoint. Traffic Manager does not see the traffic passing between client and service. It simply redirects request based on most appropriate endpoints.

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.

Front Door

It offers a single global entry point for customers accessing web apps, APIs, content and cloud services. Through a single pane of glass and global infrastructure, It enables Azure customers to build, manage and secure their global applications and content. It also enhance performance.

When choosing a global load balancer between Traffic Manager and Azure Front Door for global routing, you should consider what’s similar and what’s different about the two services. Both services provide

• Multi-geo redundancy: If one region goes out of service, traffic seamlessly routes to the closest region without any intervention from the application owner.
• Closest region routing: Traffic is automatically routed to the closest region

Traffic Manager vs Front Door

Because of the performance, operability and security benefits to HTTP workloads with Front Door, we recommend customers use Front Door for their HTTP workloads. Traffic Manager and Front Door can be used in parallel to serve all traffic for your application.