Azure — Difference between Traffic Manager and Front Door Service in Azure

Summary

Azure's Traffic Manager and Front Door Service are both global load balancers, with Traffic Manager operating at the DNS level for any protocol and Front Door providing HTTP acceleration with advanced routing and security features.

Abstract

Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Front Door Service are compared as global load balancing solutions. Traffic Manager is a DNS-based service that provides multi-geo redundancy and closest region routing for various protocols, including HTTP, TCP, and UDP. It redirects requests to the most appropriate endpoint without handling the traffic itself. On the other hand, Front Door is a single global entry point for web apps and APIs, offering HTTP(S) acceleration by proxying traffic at the Edge of Microsoft's network, which improves latency and throughput. Front Door allows for independent scalability by routing requests to different backend services based on rules and application health. It also includes inline security features such as rate limiting and IP ACL-ing. The article recommends using Front Door for HTTP workloads due to its performance, operability, and security benefits, but notes that Traffic Manager and Front Door can be used together for comprehensive application traffic management.

Opinions

Traffic Manager is praised for its ability to route any type of network traffic due to its operation at the DNS layer.
Front Door is highlighted for its performance enhancements, particularly for HTTP workloads, due to its Edge proxying and use of hot connections.
The article suggests that Front Door's security features, such as rate limiting and IP ACL-ing, provide valuable protection for backend services.
The recommendation is made to use Front Door for HTTP workloads, indicating a preference for its advanced capabilities over Traffic Manager in certain scenarios.
It is implied that a combination of Traffic Manager and Front Door can be beneficial for serving all traffic for an application, suggesting a hybrid approach to global load balancing.

TL;DR:

When choosing a global load balancer between Traffic Manager and Azure Front Door for global routing, you should consider what’s similar and what’s different about the two services. Both services provide

Multi-geo redundancy: If one region goes down, traffic seamlessly routes to the closest region without any intervention from the application owner.

Closest region routing: Traffic is automatically routed to the closest region.

Traffic Manager: It uses DNS to redirect requests to an appropriate geographical location endpoint. Traffic Manager does not see the traffic passing between client and service. It simply redirects request based on most appropriate endpoints.

Front Door: It offers a single global entry point for customers accessing web apps, APIs, content and cloud services. Through a single pane of glass and global infrastructure, It enables Azure customers to build, manage and secure their global applications and content. It also enhance performance.

Protocol

Traffic Manager — Any protocol: Because Traffic Manager works at the DNS layer, you can route any type of network traffic; HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc.

Front Door — HTTP acceleration: With Front Door traffic is proxied at the Edge of Microsoft’s network. Because of this, HTTP(S) requests see latency and throughput improvements reducing latency for SSL negotiation and using hot connections from AFD to your application.

Routing

Traffic Manager — On-premises routing: With routing at a DNS layer, traffic always goes from point to point. Routing from your branch office to your on premises datacenter can take a direct path; even on your own network using Traffic Manager.

Front Door — Independent scalability: Because Front Door works with the HTTP request, requests to different URL paths can be routed to different backend / regional service pools (microservices) based on rules and the health of each application microservice.

Billing

Traffic Manager — Billing format: DNS-based billing scales with your users and for services with more users, plateaus to reduce cost at higher usage.

Front Door — Inline security: Front Door enables rules such as rate limiting and IP ACL-ing to let you protect your backends before traffic reaches your application.

Azure — Difference between Traffic Manager and Front Door Service

TL;DR:

Key Differences

Protocol

Routing

Billing

Summary