November 08, 2021

Need a low-cost inbound traffic management and load balancing solution? Want to set it up in minutes? Azure Traffic Manager is your best option

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Azure Traffic Manager is our primary site availability and performance solution for all services we provide to our employees. We have a complex setup with multi-sites and a cloud region, and inbound traffic hit multiple locations, we have multiple [Azure Traffic Manager] configuration for numerous services, for example, for services offered from multiple locations, we have region-based configuration that returns the nearest endpoint for clients. Additionally, we use [Azure Traffic Manager] to provide High Availability across multiple regions, downtime hits 30 seconds in case of a failure with a connected client, which is considered minimal for us, users are then directed to the next healthy endpoint. [Azure Traffic Manager] is considered an essential part of our setup, without it, many of our business services will be affected and many more complex technologies would be required

Pros and Cons

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

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Most Important Features

Performance DNS Load Balancing
High Availability for Services across Multiple Datacenters
High Availability & Load Balancing for Inbound Traffic Across Multiple Internet Links

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Route 53

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.

Other Software Used

Azure App Service, Kasm Workspaces, Azure VPN Gateway, Azure Databases, Azure Front Door, Azure Application Gateway

Operating Systems	Unspecified
Mobile Application	No

Azure Traffic Manager

Overview

What is Azure Traffic Manager?

Need a low-cost inbound traffic management and load balancing solution? Want to set it up in minutes? Azure Traffic Manager is your best option

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