Azure Front Door Cost Breakdown and Models

Azure Front Door is a managed service that provides a single entry point for your web applications, allowing for improved scalability, reliability, and performance. It's designed to handle a large volume of traffic.

The cost of Azure Front Door is based on a pay-as-you-go model, which means you only pay for what you use. This can help reduce costs for small to medium-sized applications.

You can expect to pay for the number of requests your application receives, as well as the amount of data transferred. This is in addition to any costs associated with the underlying Azure services you're using.

Azure Front Door also provides a number of free tiers and discounts for large-scale deployments, which can help reduce costs even further.

Azure Front Door Pricing can be a bit complex, but let's break it down. You're charged based on data transfer out from the edge location to the client, which is $0.17 per GB for the first 10 TB in Zone 1 - North America.

Data transfer in from the client to the edge location is not billed. However, data transfer between Azure Front Door and an Azure website, also known as bandwidth, is charged separately.

Routing Rules are also a factor in pricing. The first 5 routing rules are free, but each additional rule costs $0.012 per hour.

Frontend Hosts or Custom Domains are another consideration. You get the first 100 domains for free, but each additional domain costs $5 per month.

Here's a summary of the pricing for data transfer out from the edge location to the client:

Data transfer costs from Azure Front Door to the client vary depending on the geographical region of the Front Door edge location that serves the request. The prices are different for each region.

Here's a breakdown of the costs for data transfer from Azure Front Door to the client:

Data transfer from the origin to Front Door is not billed by Front Door, even if the origin is in a different region.

Edge to Client Data Transfer is a crucial aspect of any data transfer strategy. The cost of transferring data from the Edge to the client varies depending on the geographical region.

The first 10 TB of data transfer per month is charged at $0.083 per GB for Zone 1 - North America, and the same price applies to Zone 6 - Europe.

For Zone 2 - Asia Pacific, the price is higher at $0.115 per GB. This is the same for Zone 3 - South America and Zone 7 - Middle East and Africa.

The cost of data transfer also depends on the volume of traffic. For the next 40 TB (10-50 TB) per month, the price drops to $0.066 per GB for Zone 1 - North America.

Here's a breakdown of the prices for the next 40 TB per month:

For higher volumes of traffic, the price per GB continues to decrease. For the next 100 TB (50-150 TB) per month, the price drops to $0.057 per GB for Zone 1 - North America.

The cost of data transfer from the Edge to the client is an important factor to consider when planning your data transfer strategy.

You can use Private Link with Front Door Premium to connect to your origin.

Front Door Premium has a higher base fee and request processing fee, but you don't pay extra for Private Link traffic compared to traffic that uses an origin's public endpoint.

To configure a Private Link origin, you select a region for the private endpoint to use.

A subset of Azure regions support Private Link traffic for Front Door.

If the region you select is different from the region the origin is deployed to, there isn't an extra charge for cross-region traffic.

However, the request latency likely is greater when the region is different.

Azure Front Door cost is determined by several pricing models and features. You're charged based on data transfer out from the edge location to the client, with rates varying by zone: $0.17 per GB in North America, $0.25 per GB in Asia Pacific, and so on.

Data transfer in from the client to the edge location is also billed separately, with rates starting at $0.15 per GB for the next 40 TB in North America.

Azure Front Door also charges for routing rules, with the first 5 rules costing $0.03 per hour and additional rules costing $0.012 per hour. Frontend hosts or custom domains are free for the first 100, but additional domains cost $5 per month.

Here's a breakdown of the data transfer out pricing by zone:

You'll be charged an hourly fee for each Front Door profile, which is billed for each hour or partial hour that your profile is deployed. The rate you're charged depends on the Front Door tier that you deploy.

A single Front Door profile can contain multiple endpoints, but you're not billed extra for each endpoint. This is a convenient feature that can help you save money.

You won't pay extra fees to use features like traffic acceleration, response caching, response compression, the rules engine, Front Door's inherent DDoS protection, and custom web application firewall (WAF) rules. If you use Front Door Premium, you also won't pay extra fees to use managed WAF rule sets or Private Link origins.

Here's a breakdown of the hourly fees for each Front Door tier:

Azure Front Door offers a premium option that includes Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Private Link at no additional cost.

This premium option provides an extra layer of security and control over your application's traffic.

With WAF included, you can protect your application from common web attacks and vulnerabilities, ensuring a secure experience for your users.

Private Link, on the other hand, allows you to access your Azure resources securely and privately, reducing the risk of data exposure.

Here are some key features of the premium option:

Overall, the premium option is a great choice for organizations that require a high level of security and control over their application's traffic.

Azure Front Door cost can be complex, but understanding traffic and load balancing is key to optimizing your expenses.

Traffic from clients to Front Door edge locations is charged at different rates depending on the location of the Front Door edge location.

The billing region for traffic from a client in Australia to Contoso's website is Australia, as seen in Example 4: Cross-region traffic.

Front Door charges for data transfer from the edge location to the origin, with 1 KB incrementing the meter in the billing region.

Data transfer from Front Door to the client is also charged, with 30 KB incrementing the meter in the billing region.

If your origin is in a different Azure region, you aren't billed extra for inter-region traffic.

Here's a breakdown of what's charged in the billing region for a request to Contoso's website from a client in Australia:

Azure Front Door's caching feature can reduce latency by up to 50% by storing frequently accessed content in a global network of edge servers.

This caching feature can be configured to cache static content, such as images and videos, and dynamic content, such as API responses.

By caching dynamic content, Azure Front Door can reduce the load on your backend servers, making your application more scalable and secure.

Azure Front Door's built-in security features, including SSL/TLS encryption and IP blocking, can help protect your application from common web attacks.

Serving a request from cache is a game-changer for performance and cost savings. It's like having a super-efficient librarian who retrieves the book from the shelf instead of ordering a new copy.

A request served from cache means that the response is retrieved from the cache layer, rather than being fetched from the origin server. This saves time and reduces the load on the origin server.

According to Example 2, when a second request arrives at the same Front Door edge location and a valid cached response is available, the following billing meters are incremented:

This means that only the data transfer from Front Door to client is incremented, and it's a relatively small 30 KB.

A request blocked by the web application firewall (WAF) won't be sent to the origin. However, Front Door will still charge for the request and to send a response.

If a custom WAF rule blocks requests from a specific IP address, Front Door will charge for the request in the billing region of the blocked IP address.

A custom error response page, like the one configured by the WAF, will also incur data transfer charges. For example, if the error response page is 1 KB in size, Front Door will charge for 1 KB of data transfer in the billing region of the blocked IP address.

Here's a summary of the charges incurred when a request is blocked by the WAF: