Application Delivery and Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure

Chapter 2. Managed Load-Balancing Options in Azure

Microsoft Azure, like other cloud service providers, offers the ability to instantly provision computing resources on demand. This includes support for fully managed Azure services such as load balancers, as well as support for third-party network virtual appliance load balancers such as NGINX. There are four native managed load-balancing services in Azure to ensure always-available applications both on the public internet and on private or virtual networks. This chapter will explore the features and capabilities of these four services to show how to improve load balancing, performance, security, and high availability for workloads on Azure. Each solution has its own pricing model; for the most part, the pricing calculation is based on request count and amount of data processed, although Azure Application Gateway does have a base cost associated with its usage per hour.

Azure Native Load Balancing

The Azure managed services that provide load balancing functionality enable load balancing in different ways and at different layers of the stack. These services complement one another and can be layered to provide the intended type of service.

• Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 (transport layer) service that handles UDP and TCP protocols.
• Azure Application Gateway is a Layer 7 HTTP load balancer with an application delivery controller and SSL/TLS termination offload capabilities.
• Azure Traffic Manager provides DNS-based, domain-level ...