Chapter 2

Azure Application Gateway

Overview

Azure Application Gateway is an ideal load balancer for web servers and applications that require HTTP/HTTPS traffic load-balancing and routing. It operates at the application layer (OSI layer 7 of the TCP and UDP stack) and can therefore analyze incoming traffic for custom routing based on URL paths and host headers in the incoming request. (See Figure 2-1.)

A diagram is showing how the Azure Application Gateway handles user traffic to route HTTP/HTTPS traffic using routing rules to back-end services, such as VMs, VMSS, on-premises/external app servers, and Azure App Services.

FIGURE 2-1 The Azure Application Gateway handles incoming traffic using routing rules to back-end services.

Traditional load balancers operate at OSI layer 4, meaning they can only route traffic with limited parameters, such as the source IP ...

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