Mike: Welcome to Distributing Global Application Traffic.
Distributing application traffic globally
is necessary for delivering a seamless user experience
to customers around the world.
By leveraging Azure services like Front Door,
Traffic Manager and Content Delivery Network or CDN,
you can improve performance and user experience,
increase availability and reliability,
and get more efficient resource utilization
across all the different regions you have globally.
Azure Front Door is a powerful service
for distributing global application traffic
and accelerating application performance.
It provides global HTTP load balancing and routing,
ensuring that user requests are efficiently directed
to the nearest backend, based on latency.
It also has an integrated web application firewall
for general application and protection.
One of the key features of Azure Front Door
is Anycast-based global load balancing.
By utilizing Microsoft's global network,
Front Door can route user requests
to the closest available backend,
which helps to minimize latency
and again, ends up being that it provides
a better user experience.
Front Door also supports URL-based and path-based routing,
allowing you to route requests
based on specific URL paths or patterns.
This allows you to distribute traffic
to different backends based on the content
or functionality of your application.
It also has SSL offloading, which helps
with offloading your encryption
and decryption needs at the edge,
similar to an application gateway.
Front Door also integrates with custom domains
and SSL certificates, which allows you to use
your own domain names and branding
while ensuring secure communication with your users.
Think when someone actually navigates to a website,
instead of getting a default Microsoft Domain name,
they get your company domain name instead.
Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic routing service
that enables global traffic distribution
and failover capabilities,
and it allows you to control how user traffic is directed
to your application endpoints
based on different routing methods.
It also has automatic failover to healthy backends.
Traffic Manager offers several routing methods
to suit different scenarios.
The priority method routes traffic based on
a predefined priority list,
ensuring that the highest priority healthy backend
receives the traffic.
The weighted method distributes traffic proportionally
based on assigned weights to each backend.
For performance sensitive applications,
the performance method routes traffic
to the nearest backend based on network latency.
The geographic method allows you to route traffic
based on the geographic location of users,
which is helpful for complying
with data residency requirements
or tailoring content based on region,
but also has the fringe benefit
of often being more performant, since users are grabbing
their data from a geographically closer location.
The multivalue method
returns multiple healthy backends in a single DNS response,
allowing the client to choose the most appropriate endpoint,
and the subnet method enables you to route traffic
based on user IP ranges, providing granular control
over traffic distribution,
meaning if you want specific IP ranges
to go to specific nodes, you can use
the subnet method to do that.
Health monitoring is a critical aspect of Traffic Manager.
By configuring health probes, you can monitor
the health of your backends and ensure
that traffic is routed only to healthy endpoints.
Some common use cases for Traffic Manager
are if you want to do global traffic distribution
and load balancing, you want disaster recovery
and business continuity scenarios.
It's sometimes helpful for AB testing or canary releases.
And Traffic Manager is particularly useful
when you have multiple application endpoints
distributed across different regions around the globe,
and you need to route traffic based on various criteria
that often involve a geolocation of some sort.
The Azure CDN is a global solution
for accelerating content delivery and reducing latency.
It does this by caching static content at the edge
closer to users.
Azure CDN integrates with multiple providers,
including Microsoft's own, Verizon and Akamai,
which gives you flexibility
and a choice based on your specific requirements.
So you may have a reason to choose one over the other.
You have options.
One of the key features of Azure CDN
is that global distribution and edge caching,
and so it serves the content
from the nearest edge server to the users.
It also supports dynamic site acceleration,
which accelerates the delivery of both your dynamic
and static content.
It also has compression and caching optimization
to reduce overall traffic,
and it compresses the content and optimizes the caching
through settings that you can choose based on your needs.
The most common use cases for any CDN,
but in this case, Azure CDN,
is accelerating your static content, like images, videos.
You may have some CSS or JavaScript files.
And reducing your overall latency for your application.
Choosing the right global traffic distribution solution
depends on various factors specific to your application
and business requirements.
It's essential to consider
your application's traffic patterns,
its performance and latency needs,
availability and failover requirements,
security and compliance considerations,
and whether you need integration
with existing infrastructure.
When comparing the three,
consider the level of routing granularity needed,
the importance of performance acceleration and caching,
the need for health monitoring and failover,
and any other specific security features you may need,
or whether you need a web application firewall integration.
When implementing global traffic distribution,
follow your best practices,
like designing for high availability and geo-redundancy,
optimizing performance with your caching
and content delivery, securing your traffic
always with encryption
and ideally even with a web application firewall
for specific targeted attacks,
implementing proper health monitoring
and failover mechanisms,
regularly testing and monitoring
the traffic distribution setup,
primarily because with all of the availability
of these great services,
one or more or a combination of them
will often change as far as which is the ideal solution.
KnowNews Inc. is a global news and media company
that wants to distribute their application traffic globally
to ensure high performance availability
and efficient content delivery
for their millions of users worldwide.
Here are a list of their requirements.
Go ahead and pause the video, take a look at them,
and once you're ready, go ahead and resume the video.
First, they can leverage Azure Front Door
global HTTP load balancing and routing.
By configuring this, they can route their users
to the nearest application backend based on latency,
and they can ensure optimal performance
and minimize response times.
Because of the caching and compression available,
it also helps to accelerate their content delivery
to protect against web vulnerabilities and DDoS attacks.
They can implement the web application firewall feature
inside of Front Door, so they can have
their built-in protection against the common threats
and customize based on whether they have
specific functionality in their application
that needs to be secured.
They can also utilize Azure Traffic Manager
for global traffic routing and failover.
So here they would configure Traffic Manager
with the performance routing method
so that they can route users
to the nearest Front Door endpoint,
ensuring the best possible performance.
They'll have health probes that can be defined
to monitor the health of the Front Door
and backend applications and automatically failover
to route traffic to healthy endpoints
in case of regional outages.
And finally, to further accelerate the delivery
of their static content, such as their images,
videos, things like that,
KnowNews can leverage Azure CDN
to put everything at the edge
to reduce latency and improve that user experience.
They'll optimize their caching settings
and enable compression to further enhance that performance,
and so by using all three technologies,
they are allowing their users
to get the content that they need,
which being a news company,
they have a large amount of media.
So by using all three, they are ensuring failover,
they're ensuring performance of the application itself,
and they're ensuring when their users want to get the media
that they are publishing,
that it's getting to them in a timely fashion.
This is a example of how a real world scenario
that is being used in real life
can apply all three of these services and technologies
to provide the best solution.
Thanks so much for being here in this video.
I hope it's been helpful, and I'll see you in the next one.