Azure Load Balancing Decision Tree

The decision between these services follows a clear pattern based on your requirements. Use Azure Load Balancer when you need to distribute UDP or TCP traffic at high scale within a single region and do not require SSL termination or application-layer routing. Choose Application Gateway when building a web application that needs SSL offloading, cookie-based sessions, path-based routing, or WAF protection. Select Traffic Manager for DNS-level failover across regions when you want simple, low-latency routing without proxying. Pick Front Door when you need global HTTP routing with caching, TLS termination at the edge, and built-in security at scale.