Azure Networking PaaS

Azure Front Door Accelerating and Securing Web Applications

Azure Front Door is a service offered by Microsoft Azure that provides a scalable and secure entry point for the fast delivery of your global web applications

Introduction

Azure Front Door is a service offered by Microsoft Azure that provides a scalable and secure entry point for the fast delivery of your global web applications. It is designed to offer various layers of security, including DDoS protection, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and SSL offload. It also provides global load balancing and URL-based routing capabilities to ensure high availability and performance.

What is Azure Front Door?

Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry-point that uses the Microsoft global edge network to create fast, secure, and widely scalable web applications. With Azure Front Door, you can transform your global (multi-region) consumer and enterprise applications into robust, high-performance personalized modern applications.

Setting Up Azure Front Door

  1. Create a Front Door: In the Azure portal, you can create a new Front Door within a few clicks. You’ll need to specify some basic information such as your subscription, resource group, and a unique name for your Front Door.

  2. Configure Frontend Hosts: Frontend hosts are the domain names that you want the Front Door to respond to. You can add your custom domain or use the default domain provided by Azure.

  3. Configure Routing Rules: Routing rules define the conditions that a request must meet for it to be routed to a specific backend pool. You can configure these rules based on the URL path or other parameters of the incoming request.

  4. Configure Backend Pools: Backend pools are the set of servers where your web application is running. You can add multiple backends to a single pool and Front Door will automatically load balance the traffic among them.

  5. Configure Health Probes: Health probes are used by Front Door to determine the health of your backends. If a backend is deemed unhealthy, Front Door will stop sending traffic to it until it becomes healthy again.

Key Features of Azure Front Door

  • URL-Based Routing: Azure Front Door allows you to route user traffic to different backend services based on the URL path of the request. This is particularly useful for microservices architectures where different services are responsible for different parts of the application.

  • Session Affinity: If your application relies on maintaining a user session, Azure Front Door can keep the user’s session sticky to a specific backend. This is done using cookies and ensures that all requests from a user during a session are served by the same backend.

  • SSL Offload: Azure Front Door can terminate the SSL connection at the edge of the Microsoft network, relieving your backends from the overhead of decrypting SSL traffic.

  • Custom Domains and Certificate Management: You can use your own custom domain name with Azure Front Door. It also provides automatic certificate management, which means it can handle the procurement and renewal of SSL certificates for your custom domains.

  • Web Application Firewall (WAF): Azure Front Door comes with built-in WAF capabilities. You can define custom WAF policies to protect your application from common exploits like SQL injection or Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).

Conclusion

Azure Front Door is a powerful service for accelerating and securing your web applications. Its global load balancing and URL-based routing capabilities ensure high availability and performance, while its security features like WAF and DDoS protection help keep your applications safe from threats.

For more information, you can refer to the official Azure Front Door documentation and the Azure Front Door FAQ.