Azure Application Gateway Design and Deployment Guide

Azure Application Gateway is a powerful tool for managing traffic to your web applications. It provides a secure and scalable way to distribute traffic across multiple instances of your application.

With Azure Application Gateway, you can configure multiple listeners to handle different types of traffic, such as HTTP and HTTPS. This allows you to handle both secure and unsecure traffic in a single gateway.

The gateway can also be configured to use different routing methods, such as round-robin and least connections. This ensures that traffic is distributed evenly across all instances of your application.

Azure Application Gateway is an advanced web traffic load balancer that operates at the OSI model's application layer (layer 7). It's designed to make routing decisions based on additional attributes of an HTTP request, such as URI path or host headers.

Azure Application Gateway works on Layer 7 of the OSI model, which is different from traditional load balancers that operate at Layer 4 and route traffic based on source IP address and port.

This advanced routing capability allows you to build a scalable and highly-available web front end in Azure. By routing traffic based on URI path or host headers, you can optimize your application deployments for better performance and reliability.

Azure Application Gateway is a load balancing solution provided by Microsoft Azure, designed to manage traffic for your web applications. It's a helpful tool for web traffic managers, similar to AWS Application Gateway, which also makes routing decisions based on URI or host headers.

Here are some key features of Azure Application Gateway:

Designing an Azure Application Gateway requires a solid understanding of its components. The main components of the Azure Application Gateway service are front-end IP addresses, back-end pools, listeners, request routing rules, HTTP settings, and health probes.

To design and deploy these components effectively, you should consider sizing and scaling as well as TLS policy. This will help ensure your web applications are secure and perform well under various loads.

Here are the key components of Azure Application Gateway:

To design and deploy a secure payment platform, you need to consider the limitations of legacy systems. Classic Active Server Pages (ASP) were not PCI compliant and lacked the ability to scale on-demand.

The system also had no documentation pertaining to the DLLs, making maintenance and upgrades a nightmare. This lack of documentation was a major concern for enterprises.

A secure payment platform requires the latest security features, which legacy systems like classic ASP were unable to provide. This is why enterprises needed to shift to a more advanced and secure solution.

To achieve zero downtime and data loss, enterprises needed to transition to a cloud-based platform like Azure. This would also reduce maintenance requirements and costs.

End-to-end TLS/SSL encryption is crucial for security standards and compliance, and Azure's Application Gateway can provide this encryption. This is especially important for enterprises that handle sensitive customer information.

Designing and deploying Azure Application Gateway requires a solid understanding of its components and how they work together.

The main components of Azure Application Gateway are front-end IP addresses, back-end pools, listeners, request routing rules, HTTP settings, and health probes.

A front-end IP address is the public IP address that clients use to access your web application.

Back-end pools are the servers or services that serve the client request with the required application response.

Listeners are used to route incoming traffic to the correct back-end pool.

Request routing rules determine how traffic is routed to the back-end pool.

HTTP settings specify the HTTP configuration for the back-end pool.

Health probes monitor the health of back-end pool instances and help the service decide which instances are healthy and usable for request routing.

Here are the main components of Azure Application Gateway:

Each of these components plays a crucial role in ensuring that your web application is secure, scalable, and highly available.

Understanding how to design and deploy these components is essential for building a successful Azure Application Gateway.

By following best practices and considering your environment's requirements, you can create a robust and secure Azure Application Gateway that meets your needs.

Azure Application Gateway offers a range of configuration and settings options to help you customize its behavior and ensure your application runs smoothly.

You can define HTTP settings, which include the back-end servers' port number, protocol, encryption settings, and more. These settings are used to route traffic to back-end servers when a matching request is received.

Cookie-Based Session Affinity is a setting that instructs the gateway to use affinity to always route requests from the same client to the same hosts, assuming the host is online. Connection Draining is another setting that instructs the application gateway to gracefully drain connections on back-end servers as they may be taken down for maintenance.

Custom Health Probe is a setting that helps the gateway understand how it should validate the health of the back-end pool.

To configure Azure Application Gateway, you'll need to follow a series of steps. This includes visiting the Azure portal, searching for "Application gateways", and clicking "Add." You'll then need to fill in basic details such as the resource group, autoscaling details, and virtual network.

When creating a new VNet, you'll need to choose the frontend IP address type and create a new Public IP address. You'll then need to select the required backend pool for the application gateway and click on "Configuration."

Under "Configuration", you'll need to add a routing rule, specifying the rule name and routing rules along with the backend targets. You'll also need to turn "Error page url" to Yes to add a link for the static web page to a storage account.

Azure Application Gateway supports SSL/TLS termination at the gateway, which decrypts incoming SSL/TLS sessions from clients and relieves backend servers from decryption tasks. This offloads a significant CPU burden from the backend servers, enhancing the overall throughput and performance of the application.

Here are some key features and configurations of Azure Application Gateway: