Azure Application Gateway

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.

It won't be useful when we have only dealt with just HTTP requests. If the application has to serve users with different file types, then this is useful.

I would strongly recommend the Azure application gateway

It's an appropriate solution for Azure Cloud and integrates well with AKS - Azure Kubernetes Service. This in turn makes the default solution for any modern containerized and Kubernetes Orchestrated application. The good support for SSL/TLS and integration with Azure Key Vault makes it useful to comply with security guidelines.

Azure Application Gateway is basically a web traffic load balancer well suited in enterprise environments that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Is a really good solution for your traffic management. It is also easy to integrate with modern deployment architectures like containers and Kubernetes and very cost effective. There needs to be more training material available for teams to learn more about this service.

For building scalable and highly available applications, Azure Application Gateway does most of the job on behalf of you; automatically load-balancing traffic from a number of users to a number of back-end servers. This ensure scalability and availability. The in-built security is great as can be expected from Microsoft, and user has a variety of tools for monitoring the health of the load-balancing function as well as the health of back end servers behind it.