Scalability is crucial for any application development especially if you want to handle up and downs in your app traffic and manage requests efficiently without affecting the user experience.
Scalable apps can be easily customized and updated to meet new demands. They are also easier to maintain, which reduces the cost of running and maintaining a website or mobile application. It needs to be able to handle any amount of users in order to maintain its user experience.
What is Azure Front Door?
Azure Front Door helps to define, monitor, and manage the global routing for web traffic. Front Door works as a web proxy similar to the application gateway. Customer connections are routed to a front door IP address and connect to the nearest front door nodes. That way traffic will be routed to application back-end services easily.
- Instant global failover for high availability
- Supports multi-region enterprise applications
- High performance
How it is used?
Azure Front Door is mainly used for load balancing and network routing. For example, if a person from the APAC region is trying to access a web application hosted in the North America (NA) region. The request goes all the way through NA and is processed and comes back as the response. But using Azure Front Door service, we can connect web applications hosted in different regions and will finally have a single endpoint that connects all servers to avoid latency.
Now, if a user requests from a specific region, the request will go to the nearest available server, so that the delay between request and response times will be reduced.
Other solutions provided by Microsoft,
- Traffic Manager
- Application Gateway
- Load Balancer
Using a Web Application Firewall(WAF) in Front Door allows securing the web applications against vulnerability, which keeps the applications highly available for the customers. Malicious attacks are blocked at the network edge/virtual network.
Azure CDN
Azure CDN (Content Delivery Network) service just like Azure Front Door, serves static websites to all global regions at scale. CDN caches all static resources for a certain period of time by pulling them from the original server that it calls origin. After that, any requests made by users for resources related to CDN are provided from this cached copy. When the cache expires, the resources are refreshed with re-requests to the origin.
How it works
- Azure CDN can be configured through multiple sources like Azure App Service or Azure Storage account
- Once the configuration is completed You’ll get a public URL like <your-app>.azureedge.net
- CDN will cache the static folders for a specific time and serves them without any delay
- Once the cache time is ended, a new request will go to the server and pulls updated files and cache it again
Advantages
- Easy to configure – can be configured with a few steps in the Azure portal
- Eliminate load on the server to serve static files, so that the server CPU can be utilized on other tasks
- Better performance and improved user experience
