AZ-700 Microsoft Azure Networking Solutions- Traffic Manager

1. Create a Traffic Manager DEMO

Now, sometimes you’re going to want a service that just does one thing well. And Azure traffic manager is a Dnsbased traffic load balancer. And so what it’s doing is basically allowing you to distribute traffic to different Azure global regions, very similar to the Azure Front Door service. But Azure Front Door has a lot of bells and whistles. It does cache, it does compression and things like that. Traffic Manager really just determines what is the best server to send your clients request to. So if your client is in Europe, sends it in one place, if it’s in the United States, it sends it somewhere else, depending on your setup. We’re into the Azure Portal and we’re going to search for Traffic Manager. Now, in the Azure Portal, what we’re looking for is called a Traffic Manager profile. So Microsoft Traffic Manager profile and we can see the interface is extremely simplistic, right? Let’s just give it a name.

So a Z SJD test TM in my case, and it comes fully qualified trafficmanager net. So once again, just like Front Door Service, you’re going to have to use your registrar and a C name record in order to redirect traffic to here. But this could certainly be the front end of your website. Now, one thing we get to choose, that we didn’t get to choose in a lot of the other methods is how do we want traffic to be distributed? So it’s a global world and you’ve got your application deployed in five locations around the world. And so now we get to determine how do we distribute the traffic. Now, it could be something such as geographic, which would mean the geography base. You want to send your German customers into Germany, you want your other Europeans to be in Europe, et cetera. There could be just some waiting.

So you want 75% of your traffic to go to the United States and 25% of your traffic to go to Canada. You can set that. The priority setting is basically if you want all your traffic to go to one location, but if it’s not available, you’ve got a second priority and a third party. It’s almost like 100% of your traffic goes to your preferred destination. We can also look at MultiValue and basically it’s going to return all values. When a client goes and looks up a domain, it’s going to basically say, here is a list of five IP addresses that we’re returning with this request. And finally the subnet mapping is going to be based on an effectively manual mapping, where you’re going to say, this is the IP address range and this is where we want this to be sent. So I’m going to leave it on performance. Put this in our resource group. Again, it’s a global service. So the location of the service is global, not West US. If they create.

2. Test the Traffic Manager

So we have a Traffic Manager profile, but we haven’t set it up yet. And so it’s currently set to enabled and monitoring is inactive. But you can see there’s no what are called Endpoints. If we go into endpoints, then we can decide where we’re sending the traffic to. So we have azure endpoint. So it could be something inside of Azure, an external endpoint or this nested endpoint. The nested endpoint is just, just another Traffic Manager profile. And so you could have the concept of one type of routing, say priority routing at the top level, but then underneath that you could have some sort of performance based routing after the priority. So you have basically nested Traffic Manager profile. So I’m going to leave it as azure endpoint. Give it a name. I’m going to call this my traffic manager endpoint.

And we can see that you have some type of cloud service, an app service or an IP address that you can transfer this to. Now the cloud services are the platform as a services within Azure App service. Do I have any? I guess I have a WordPress. Blog. There’s nothing there, it’s just a sample WordPress Blog I could send stuff to or I could say IP address. So we can put the application gateway IP address in here. Now the reason my application gateway can’t be set up right now is because I haven’t given a name to the IP address. So we’ll do that real quick. Go to the close that, go back home. We’re going to go into the application gateway IP address. We can see that the DNS label is empty, so I’ll call it a Zsgd App GW. And you’ll see the fully qualified name is here, so I can save that. Go back to the traffic manager endpoints. Add an endpoint. I want this to be an IP address and now I can choose my application gateway IP address and we’ll say add.

Now this is a lot simpler than we’ve seen so far in the front door service and even the application gateway service. That’s it. We just added an end point and Azure will take care of taking in traffic over its domain and redirecting it to one or more of these regions according to the routing algorithm that we’ve chosen. I should turn that machine back on because otherwise it’s all not going to work. And so if we go to the URL listed for the Traffic Manager, we can see our familiar screen. And so we’ve used this as an alternative instead of the front door service. It’s a lot easier, cheaper to, to install, doesn’t come with all the features. But if you need to have a website that is deployed into multiple regions and you want to have one URL that users are going to be taken to the website location that is closest to them or best for them, then you can look into Traffic Manager as a way to do that.