Application Delivery in the cloud

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Traditional load balancers have lately evolved to become intelligent application delivery controllers (ADC) which implement various techniques to improve performance along with balancing load across a group of backend servers. Some of the techniques include caching content, compression of assets (js files, images etc.), taking over SSL related process from web servers, providing security from DDoS, SQL injection, XSS etc.. ADCs are like one-stop-shop for providing performance and security. 

Load balancers for non-HTTP(s) workloads:

Azure Traffic Manager: Is a global non-HTTP(s)/DNS load balancer. DNS load balancers provide IP address of an healthy endpoint based on the configured rules. The endpoint can be an application gateway or a load balancer depending on whether SSL offloading or application layer processing is required or not.

Azure Load Balancer: is a non-HTTP(s) global (cross-region) load balancer (aka network load balancer) operates at layer 4 (transport layer of OSI model).


ADCs for HTTP(s) workloads:

Azure Front Door: Is a HTTP(S) based Layer 7 global ADC. 

Azure Application Gateway: is a HTTP(s) Layer 7 (application layer of OSI model) regional ADC.

Azure Front Door has WAF built-in which is similar in functionality compared to Application Gateway WAF. The main difference is where the WAF filtering is applied. In case of Front Door, WAF filter is applied at edge locations outside of the Azure data centers, while in case of App Gateway the filtering happens in Azure VNET. 

WAF is based on OWASP rule set and automatically updates protection against vulnerabilities identified by OWASP.

Refer architectures that use the above services.


Similar services in AWS:

Azure Traffic Manager + Azure DNS == AWS Route 53

Azure Front Door == AWS Global Accelerator

Azure Load Balancer == AWS Elastic Load Balancer - NLB

Azure Application Gateway == AWS Elastic Load Balancer - ALB

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