🌍 Day 12 of #100DaysOfCloud Azure Traffic Manager vs Front Door – Global Traffic Routing Demystified

As cloud applications scale globally, ensuring low latency, high availability, and intelligent routing becomes essential. In Azure, two core services help with global traffic distribution:

🚦Azure Traffic Manager

A DNS-based traffic load balancer that routes users to the closest endpoint using policies like:

• Performance (lowest latency)

• Priority (for failover)

• Geographic (for compliance or regulations)

It works at the DNS level, directing users to regional endpoints (App Services, VMs, etc.), but it doesn’t handle Layer 7 (application layer) routing or TLS termination.

🌐 Azure Front Door

A Layer 7 Application Delivery Network (ADN) that offers:

• SSL offloading

• Application acceleration via caching and TCP optimizations

• URL-based routing and path-based forwarding

• Built-in WAF (Web Application Firewall)

• Near real-time global failover

It provides a global edge presence, reducing round-trip times and improving user experience.

🔍 Example Architecture Breakdown

In the diagram above:

• Traffic Manager routes requests from files.contoso.com to the closest region (Region 1 or Region 2) using performance-based DNS routing.

• Front Door handles requests to www.contoso.com, routing them based on path (/store/*) and forwarding to the right backend.

• Both regions mirror the app architecture with App Gateways, web tiers, and load-balanced database tiers.

• Application Gateway is used internally for Layer 7 routing within the region (e.g., routing /images/* to a specific VM pool).

• Front Door accelerates delivery while WAF and TLS are handled globally at the edge.

✅ Key Differences

💡 When to Use What?

• Use Traffic Manager when you want protocol-agnostic routing, lightweight failover, or DNS-based performance routing across global deployments.

• Use Front Door when you need web app acceleration, Layer 7 routing, security at the edge, and instant global failover.

Often, enterprises use both together — Traffic Manager for non-HTTP(S) workloads, and Front Door for web applications.

🔁 Let me know your experiences with Traffic Manager or Front Door. Do you combine them in your architecture?

#Azure #CloudComputing #100DaysOfCloud #AzureArchitecture #AzureFrontDoor #AzureTrafficManager #DevOps #GlobalInfrastructure