Azure Front Door

Azure Front Door : An Overview

Microsoft has been using Azure Front Door for many years, but it wasn’t until April 2019 that it became generally available. Many well-known Microsoft services, including Office 365, Xbox, LinkedIn, Bing, and Teams, have benefited from scale and protection thanks to the technology behind Azure Front Door. We will investigate this scalable and secure entry point for web apps today. Enroll at Softlogic Solutions‘ Best Azure Certification Course in Chennai, a collaboration with IBM.

Enterprise applications can be converted into sophisticated, individualized modern applications with the help of Azure Front Door. These apps claim excellent performance and content that is accessible to a worldwide audience. Let’s find out more information about Azure Font Door.

What is Azure Front Door?

It is an application delivery network (ADN) as a service that gives apps a variety of Layer 7 load-balancing options. The service is completely managed by Azure, highly available, and scalable.

Dynamic site acceleration (DSA) and global load balancing with near real-time failover are both provided by Azure Front Door. The location of the customer has a significant impact on how well web apps operate for businesses with a worldwide reach.

Enterprises may utilize content delivery networks (CDNs) with many distribution points for a better and more dependable experience. These networks can quickly provide material to customers due to optimized connections and proximity.

The Azure Front Door service makes use of the anycast protocol, which enables additional security features like DDoS attack avoidance in addition to standard CDN capabilities.

All of the users of this multi-tenant, internationally distributed service use the same infrastructure. A specific configuration will be defined by creating a Front Door profile to an application’s needs. A Front Door’s modifications have no effect on how the other Front Doors are configured.

Basic Functions of Azure Front Door

The following are its primary abilities:

• Accelerating applications and APIs through the use of anycast will improve access to Azure application services and decrease user latency.
• By removing the costly decryption work performed by endpoints, SSL offload elevates the function in the stack.
• Developers may build geographically distributed services thanks to global HTTP load balancing, which also enables Azure to identify endpoint availability and intelligently route traffic to nearby and accessible endpoints.
• Edge web application filtering, also known as web application firewall or WAF, guards against DDoS assaults and malicious users without interfering with backend services.

Features that Azure Front Door Supports

The following is a list of its main characteristics:

• Split-TCP-based Anycast protocol-enabled application performance acceleration Hosting many websites for effective application infrastructure
• session affinity based on cookies
• Backend resource monitoring with intelligent health probes
• Request routing based on URL paths
• Management of certificates and SSL offloading
• Specify integrated WAF custom domain application security
• Using URL redirect, HTTP traffic is forwarded to HTTPS
• Personalized forwarding path and URL rewriting
• Native support for HTTP/2 and end-to-end IPv6 connection

The Architecture of the Azure Front Door

Now let’s examine Azure Front Door’s routing architecture. If caching is enabled, it will either respond to client queries or act as a reverse proxy to send them to the appropriate application backend.

A front-end host must be created to create an Azure Front Door Architecture. This serves as the application’s global endpoint. For configuring the backend services, such as an app service web application, a backend pool is then needed. To transport traffic from the frontend host configuration to the backend pool, routing rules must be implemented.

The Operation of Azure Front Door

Web applications may be accessed quickly, securely, and scalable with the aid of Azure Front Door. It offers high-bandwidth information and aids in protecting cloud-based programs. How does it do it specifically? Let’s look at it!

It reduces the amount of time needed to access the content. Users are connecting to content that is hosted on a custom domain in the following image. A number of edge locations use this. With the firewall’s access security supplying access control, its CDN capabilities optimize access to backend material.

The routing process carried out by this is based on the backend stability and the routing algorithm chosen. It works with four routing techniques:

• Latency : Lowest latency backends are used to send requests that are within the permitted sensitivity range.
• Priority : When a major backend needs to be set up to handle all traffic, the administrator assigns priorities to the backends.
• Weighted : When distributing traffic among several backends, weighted backends are used. These weights are assigned by the administrator.
• Session Affinity : The ability to configure session affinity for frontend hosts or domains makes it possible to guarantee that requests from the same end user are directed to the same backend.

It monitors the health of all configured backends by performing routine health checks. The most responsive backend resources to route client requests are determined by these backends’ responses.

Web applications are shielded from attacks and vulnerabilities by Azure Front Door’s web application firewall (WAF) features. Due to the frequent targeting of online applications, app security management can be rather difficult.

To stop prospective attacks from entering the network, it operates right at the edge of the system. The firewall is built on policies that can be linked to several its instances. These firewall rules include the following:

• A group of pre-configured rules known as managed rule sets
• Individual regulations that can be included

A rule includes :

• A prerequisite to see if a traffic rule applies
• The top importance is to decide how the rules are processed in order
• Allow, block, log, or redirect are examples of actions
• One of the two following modes:
• Detection: WAF takes no further action other than to monitor and log.
• Preventive action is taken by WAF.

When can we use Azure Front Door?

The following stock-keeping unit (SKU) options are available for Azure Front Door:

Azure Front Door Standard: Enhanced content delivery

Azure Front Door Premium: Enhanced security

Whether or whether the additional functionality supplied by Azure Front Door Standard and Azure Front Door Premium are needed will determine the choice.

The following criteria and product suggestions should be examined to choose the product that best satisfies the needs.

Scalability

An organization might not profit if there are no criteria for hosting international, scalable web applications. However, the company could employ the Azure Front Door SKUs if it works with creating, maintaining, and scaling out dynamic online apps and static content.

Think about Azure Front Door if,

Setting up, controlling, and keeping track of the worldwide routing of web traffic Improving end-user performance and dependability with rapid global failover.

Pricing

Pricing is determined by the inbound and outbound data transfers as well as the routing policies. The costs for Azure Content Delivery Network and Azure Web Application Firewall include:

• A monthly fee for each policy
• Additional fees for managed rule sets and customized rules

The following factors are used to determine the bill:

• A flat rate determined on an hourly basis
• Transfers of data coming in
• Data transfers to the outside
• Client requests arriving at the points of presence for the azure front door

Content Delivery

We can take into account the Azure Front Door Standard if we want to:

• Improve the delivery of content
• Use fundamental security tools to enable the acceleration of both static and dynamic content
• Bolster global load balancing
• Manage domains and certificates using
• Employ SSL offload
• Take advantage of improved traffic analytics

Security

The Azure Front Door Premium is better suited when additional Standard features are required:

• Numerous security features like WAF
• BOT protection
• Integration and Security analytics with Microsoft Threat Intelligence
• Private link assistance

Conclusion

Utilizing Microsoft’s dedicated private global network—from the Edge point of presence (PoP) to the application—is one of the main advantages of using Azure Front Door. Because of the traffic, the network has substantially higher reliability. Applications are directed to the closest location even if they are not hosted on Azure. As a result, end users get their own network, which improves network performance and dependability. Get top niche cloud computing skills by learning in our Azure Training Institute in Chennai with Placement Assistance at Softlogic Systems.