Not Your Father's Cloud: Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager Explained

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If you need to understand the format of this post, take a look at my introduction to the series.

Like A Boss

Traffic Manager is the grand-pappy of load balancing in Microsoft Azure (though strictly speaking it is not actually a load balancing solution).  Unlike the transparent load balancing built into Cloud Services which provide intra-Region (i.e. Japan) balancing, Traffic Manager allows you to route traffic across Regions (i.e. Japan and US) depending on service availability.  Traffic Manager also has least-latency routing support so that you can deploy your application in multiple Regions and provide great user experiences by routing a user to their nearest instance.

Goes Well With

  • Applications with a global deployment footprint where consumers can be routed to a nearby instance for better performance.
  • Applications that require load balancing beyond simple Round Robin.
  • Would be familiar to advanced load balancing used in many hosting facilities.

Open Other End

  • Simple intra-Region services that can leverage standard Cloud Service load balancing don't really need to use Traffic Manager.
  • Split services where you are running a hybrid setup of some privately-hosted and some cloud-hosted endpoints aren't supported.

Contents May Be Hot

  • Traffic Manager utilises only HTTP probes for health checks of balanced applications.  If you need UDP it won't work.
  • Your application has to return a 200 HTTP response code to be considered healthy.  Anything else will not work.

Don't Take My Word For It