Azure Application Gateway vs. Azure Traffic Manager

The best practice for a cloud environment is to use the tools provided by the cloud provider. That's why for Azure cloud, Azure Application Gateway is the most cost-effective solution that you can use. You can use a single Azure Application Gateway instance for load balancing WAF, URL-based routing, and more.

Incentivized

Azure Traffic Manager is a great product, if you have multiple sites hosting similar services (Primary and DR), and you want to ensure that users are directed to the DR in case of a primary datacenter failure, [Azure] Traffic Manager does this very nicely. If you have a service hosted across multiple regions/datacenters and you want to balance the inbound load between the regions, [Azure] Traffic Manager does this very well, of course such scenario would require a database replication or something like Cosmos-DB in the backend [Azure Traffic Manager] is also well suited for inbound traffic with multiple IPs, you can fail-over traffic from one inbound IP to another based on its availability, or if you have multiple internet connections that you want to balance the load across, it does this pretty nicely too.

Incentivized

• Uploading images by multiple end-users from several applications like web, mobile, etc.
• When there is a high volume of data requests, it helps to queue them based on the type of request. So it's easy to serve and reduce the loading time from the application layer.
• An application gateway is useful when it can identify the type of details the user is requesting.

Incentivized

• Performance DNS Load Balancing for Lowest Latency Endpoint to Clients
• Priority-Based DNS Load Balancing to ensure maximum up time for a service
• Geographic-based DNS Load Balancing to force certain clients in certain regions to connect to specific endpoints

Incentivized

• More cost-effective pricing plans are welcome for the future, especially for WAF
• Ability to automate the TLS certificate renewal procedure
• Ability to manage non-HTTP traffic

Incentivized

• Traffic View is a great feature, but doesn't work very well, sometimes it gets stuck and stops loading traffic view data
• Automatic probing for endpoints sometimes gets stuck too, I would recommend a technique to test the endpoint in real time from Azure Portal
• Traffic View heatmap is buggy and doesn't point correctly to locations
• Traffic View portal doesn't show source countries (Shows coordinates) it would be much more helpful to have coordinates auto-translated to geolocations/countries

Incentivized

Most of the Application Gateway's features and services can be managed and re-configured via either the Azure Portal GUI or via the Azure Cloud Shell, thus allowing both CLI modes, i.e. Azure CLI (Bash) and Azure Powershell. The v2 version of Application Gateway has significantly improved performance during initial configuration or during re-configuration changes, thus making it much more usable for IT admins, as compared to v1.

Incentivized

I don’t like that it's part of the Microsoft brand. In general, I am not a fan of Microsoft products but Azure gets it right.

Incentivized

HAProxy is an excellent load balancer that can also be used in cloud environments (and we do!), and is relied by hyper-large enterprises globally as well. However, HAProxy is a little bit more rudimentary in feature space, it does the core job well and securely, but doesn't provide any fancy additional features. Also, it takes more effort to deploy HAProxy than simply using an in-built feature in the Azure stack.

Incentivized

Amazon Route 53 Traffic Flow does what [Azure] Traffic Manager does, however, in Azure Configuration is separated between Azure DNS Zones (For DNS Zone Management) and [Azure] Traffic Manager for DNS Traffic Management and Load Balancing, Route 53 in a unified product for DNS Traffic Management using Traffic Flow and DNS Zone Management. Route 53 does a great job, however, we found it to be a little bit more complex to setup than [Azure] Traffic Manager, Setting up traffic manager is pretty easy even for the first time, and getting the best out of it is relatively simple.

Incentivized

• We are using Azure Application Gateway as the load balancing tool for our applications deployed on Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) clusters.

Incentivized

• Service cost is exceptionally low
• Overall, this product saves a lot of money for the value it provides and it isn't expensive
• It's around half a dollar per million queries, which is truly peanuts, extras may be required if you do advanced configuration
• I can't see any reason why any business wouldn't be using this product, very low investment for a very high return and savings

Incentivized