Why is front door private link locked behind premium?

Question

I have app containers, (internal), that i want some kind of load balacing in front. Azure front door is an excellent choice but having to pay 330 usd/month for the premium compared to the standard 35 usd/month just for the private link is insane in my opinion, especially for small businesses.

What is the reason behind this? Adding load balancer for container apps is quite cumbersome if you go for other services, like application gateway, and i really like simplicity of front door. Are there any plans to make private linking cheaper or anything else that will make load balacing for container apps easier?

Thanks

Answer 1

Hello @reft ,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform. Thank you for reaching out & hope you are doing well.

Azure Front Door Premium builds on capabilities of Azure Front Door Standard, and adds extensive security capabilities across WAF, BOT protection, Azure Private Link support, integration with Microsoft Threat Intelligence, and security analytics. WAF and Private Link pricing is included in Azure Front Door Premium.

You can refer the below article which describes the billing model for Azure Front Door and compares the pricing for the Standard, Premium and (classic) tiers.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/frontdoor/understanding-pricing

If you are using Azure App service, you can check the below doc which shows how to use Azure Front Door Standard SKU to make Azure App Service with a private endpoint, available from the Internet:

https://azure.github.io/AppService/2022/11/24/Advanced-access-restriction-scenarios-in-Azure-App-Service.html#first-advanced-scenario---filter-by-http-header

Is there anything else that will make load balancing for container apps easier?

The recommended way to secure your Azure Container Apps ingress networking traffic is to integrate it with Application gateway:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/networking?tabs=workload-profiles-env%2Cazure-cli#environment-security

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/waf-app-gateway?tabs=default-domain

But I see that you mentioned "Adding load balancer for container apps is quite cumbersome if you go for other services, like application gateway, and I really like simplicity of front door".

Are there any plans to make private linking cheaper for Azure Front Door?

I discussed this with the Azure Front Door Product Group team, and I've shared additional information in the private message.

Please check and let us know if you have any additional questions or need further assistance on this issue.

---

Please "Accept the answer" if the information helped you. This will help us and others in the community as well.