Choose an application delivery service
Azure offers several load-balancing services for distributing your workloads across multiple computing resources. As you review the options, there are several factors to consider in your planning.
Things to know about load balancing
Azure load-balancing services can be categorized along two dimensions:
- Global or Regional
- HTTP(S) or non-HTTP(S)
In the Azure portal, the Help me choose default tab highlights other configuration characteristics:
Traffic type: Are you designing a web (HTTP/HTTPS) application? Is the app public facing or is it private?
Global versus regional: Do you need to load balance virtual machines or containers within a virtual network, or load balance scale unit/deployments across regions, or both?
Availability: Does the service SLA meet your requirements?
Cost: Have you outlined your cost expectations? You can review the Azure pricing options. In addition to the cost of the service itself, consider the operations cost for managing a solution built on that service.
Features and limits: What are the overall limitations of each service? You can review the service limits.
In the next unit, we examine features of several load-balancing services, including Azure Front Door, Traffic Manager, Load Balancer, and Application Gateway.
Things to consider when choosing load balancing
As you review the descriptions of the Azure load-balancing services in the next unit, you can use the following flowchart to help you to find the ideal solution for your application. The flowchart guides you through a set of key decision criteria to reach a recommendation.
Tip
Treat this flowchart as a starting point. Every application has unique requirements, so use these recommendations as a starting point in your planning.
After you identify possible solutions for your requirements, apply the options to your scenarios and do a detailed evaluation. If your application consists of multiple workloads, evaluate each workload separately. A complete solution might incorporate two or more load-balancing solutions.
