AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions Exam
Venture into the world of Azure Infrastructure, where design meets functionality. Harness your skills and gain mastery over complex cloud structures to ace the AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions exam!
Practice Test
Expert
Practice Test
Expert
Recommend a load-balancing and routing solution
Evaluate Azure Load-Balancing and Routing Services
Azure provides multiple services to distribute traffic and improve application resilience. Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Traffic Manager, and Front Door each serve different scenarios based on OSI layer, throughput, and global reach. By understanding their capabilities, architects can match service features to performance, security, and availability goals.
Azure Load Balancer and Application Gateway operate at different network layers.
- Azure Load Balancer works at Layer 4, handling TCP and UDP with high throughput and low latency. It offers basic session affinity and health probes but doesn’t terminate SSL.
- Application Gateway works at Layer 7, supports SSL offloading, cookie-based session affinity, and integrates a Web Application Firewall for application-level protection.
Azure Traffic Manager and Azure Front Door enable global traffic distribution and failover.
- Traffic Manager is a DNS-based router that directs clients to endpoints based on priority, weighted, performance, or geographic methods. It provides cross-region failover but doesn’t proxy traffic or offload SSL.
- Front Door is a global, HTTP/HTTPS-only reverse proxy and CDN that terminates TLS at the edge, offers caching, WAF integration, and intelligent routing for dynamic and static content acceleration.
Key service features to compare include:
- Layer support: Layer 4 (Load Balancer) vs. Layer 7 (App Gateway, Front Door) vs. DNS (Traffic Manager)
- Session affinity: None or basic (Load Balancer) vs. cookie-based (App Gateway) vs. none (Traffic Manager, Front Door by default)
- SSL offloading: Not available (Load Balancer, Traffic Manager) vs. available (App Gateway, Front Door)
- Cross-region failover: Only via DNS (Traffic Manager) or proxy (Front Door) vs. regional only (Load Balancer, App Gateway)
When recommending a solution, consider:
- Throughput and protocol needs: Choose Load Balancer for UDP/TCP at scale.
- Web application features: Use Application Gateway for SSL offload and WAF.
- Global availability: Select Traffic Manager for DNS-level failover or Front Door for edge-accelerated HTTP routing with security.
By evaluating these dimensions, you can select the optimal mix of Azure routing and load-balancing services to meet specific workload requirements.
Conclusion
Understanding the various features and operational principles of Azure Load Balancer, Application Gateway, Traffic Manager, and Front Door is crucial for recommending the right load-balancing and routing solution. Each service caters to different needs in terms of throughput, layer support, session affinity, SSL offloading, and cross-region failover. By matching these capabilities to specific performance, security, and availability goals, it is possible to craft an optimal solution that ensures robust traffic management and application resilience in the Azure environment.