Azure Load Balancer offers high availability and scalability for Azure virtual machines (VMs) within a single region. To ensure high availability and scalability for globally distributed Azure services like Azure Traffic Manager. Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based tool that helps spread traffic over different services and Azure regions. It’s a great way to ensure smooth operation!
Traffic Manager helps to balance the load across services by using DNS entries to route and direct the traffic.
The front end is a Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) allocated when spun up, and traffic is spread among backend endpoints. This guide explains how to create a new Traffic Manager profile.
Let’s see how it works!
The performance method will direct traffic based on the best available performance. Traffic will be spread evenly if we have more than one backend endpoint in the same region. If endpoints are in different regions, the Traffic Manager directs traffic to the nearest one based on geography and low latency.
Create a new Azure Traffic Manager instance
In the Azure portal, navigate to the top search box, type “traffic” as the image below depicts, and tap on the Traffic Manager profiles service.
Tap on the + Create button to open the Create Traffic Manager profile wizard pane
In the Create Traffic Manager profile pane, fill in the required information, such as Name, Routing method, Subscription, Resource group, and Resource group location, and press Create.
For the sake of the demo, I have chosen the Routing method “Performance.”
To get a clear picture of how Traffic Manager operates, you first need to consider where the web apps will run. They should be hosted in different regions, i.e., in the West and North Europe data centres. That’s why I have spun up two App services in different regions.
Now, let us see how it works in reality 😀
In the Azure Portal, choose your Traffic Manager profile, i.e. “george-demo” underneath Settings, and choose Endpoints. Select + Add to add a new endpoint
Provide details for the Type (endpoint type “Azure endpoint”) and Name fields in the new pane. For Type, you can choose Azure, External, or Nested. In my demo, because I use an app service, I will choose the relevant resources according to specific target resource types, which are App services. The images below illustrate how I created two endpoints for Western and Northern Europe regions.
After the two endpoints are created, the result will be like the following figure.
Let’s check out the steps below to see how things work after setting up the two endpoints:
- Incoming requests are directed to the Traffic Manager through its front-facing endpoint.T
- The Traffic Manager then processes these requests and routes traffic to the appropriate backend endpoints according to predefined rules.
Related links
- How Traffic Manager Works
- Load-balancing options
- Azure Networking: How to deploy Azure CDN profile
- Azure Networking: How to deploy Azure CDN profile Azure Networking: Working with Azure CDN