AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Exam

Configure Secure Front Door and CDN Endpoints

Azure Front Door provides a global entry point for web applications and Content Delivery Network optimization at the edge. It uses edge locations around the world to route traffic to the nearest point, reducing latency and improving user experience. With enterprise-grade edge, you get zero downtime during updates, automatic SSL provisioning, and built-in custom domain support. Alternatively, a manual Azure Front Door setup gives you finer control over routing, caching, and security policies to meet specialized application needs.

When planning your Front Door deployment, you define frontend hosts, backend pools, and routing rules. Frontend hosts represent the public endpoints that users connect to, while backend pools group your application instances or static web apps. Routing rules determine how requests flow from the frontend to the backend based on path patterns, HTTP methods, or query strings. This structure lets you direct traffic to the correct service, balance load, and implement failover scenarios for high availability.

Configuring the Azure CDN integrated with Front Door lets you set caching and compression policies to accelerate content delivery. You can choose which file types to cache, specify query string caching behavior, and apply Brotli or Gzip compression for better bandwidth usage. Fine-tuning these settings ensures that static assets like images, scripts, and style sheets load quickly for users worldwide. Using edge caching also offloads traffic from your origin servers, reducing compute and network costs.

To protect your applications, you implement the Web Application Firewall (WAF) with either managed or custom rule sets. Managed rules cover common threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting, while custom rules let you block specific IP ranges, user agents, or headers. You can also integrate Azure DDoS Protection at the edge to guard against volumetric attacks and ensure service continuity. By applying these security measures in Front Door, you stop malicious traffic before it ever reaches your backends.

Locking down your origin resources ensures that only traffic from Azure Front Door can reach your application. In your static web app configuration, you set allowedIpRanges to include AzureFrontDoor.Backend and require the X-Azure-FDID header. You also list allowedForwardedHosts to match your azurefd.net and custom domains. These settings enforce trust at the edge, prevent direct origin access, and maintain the integrity of your secure delivery pipeline.

Conclusion

Planning and implementing Azure Front Door with its built-in CDN delivers both high performance and strong security for global applications. By defining frontend hosts, backend pools, and routing rules, you ensure traffic flows efficiently and reliably. Configuring caching, compression, WAF rule sets, and Azure DDoS Protection adds layers of defense and accelerates content delivery. Finally, restricting origin access to only Front Door completes a robust design that protects your application and improves user experience.