Azure Front Door, the Easiest Way to Make Your Web Apps Accessible to Millions of Users Globally
February 04, 2022

Azure Front Door, the Easiest Way to Make Your Web Apps Accessible to Millions of Users Globally

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with Azure Front Door

We have several web apps, some are for our customers, and some are for the company. We needed a CDN with the following features and capabilities: 1. CDN with multiple POP Locations 2. Web App Firewall capabilities 3. Rules Engine to control certain access patterns 4. Backend availability across multiple cloud regions and data centers We tested and used a few CDNs (Mainly, Verizon and Akamai over Azure) and we tested Azure Front Door, for us, Front Door was cheaper to set up and cheaper to maintain and provided all the capabilities that we needed.

Pros

  • Content delivery across all continents
  • Web & media acceleration
  • Web application firewall
  • Backend geo-availability
  • Reporting & access metrics

Cons

  • Better control over origin caching
  • Hierarchal Management UI instead of distributed management
  • TLS & Cipher Control
  • Faster publishing or change updates
  • Accelerated web access for public portals and websites
  • Protected access with built-in WAF capabilities
  • Backend high-availability across multiple geographic locations
  • AFD implementation was approx. 80% cheaper than other providers, from initiation to operation.
  • It allowed us to minimize backend resources size/processing power, taking all the load from client requests, cutting tens of thousands of dollars monthly on compute, memory, and network bandwidth.
  • Overall, the ROI of AFD is very quick, it is not an expensive solution, therefore, its ROI goals are easy to calculate and achieve, our overall ROI exceeded 300%.
It's generally hard to compare CDNs, each has its features, POP locations, latency, and availability. We have used many other CDNs, including Akamai, Verizon, and Cloudflare. They are all great, but each has its own advantages/disadvantages. From our perspective, all other providers were much harder to configure and maintain and their overall cost was higher than AFD. For example, Verizon was great, performance was excellent, but reporting/logging was not up to our expectations, and we had many issues with its Rules Engine. AFD is great for delivering your web apps globally quickly and easily, the cost is reasonable and comes with very little operational overhead, the logging and reporting capabilities are very good, additionally, its integration with Azure Cloud Services gives it an advantage over other competitors.

Do you think Azure Front Door delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Azure Front Door's feature set?

Yes

Did Azure Front Door live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Azure Front Door go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Azure Front Door again?

Yes

Azure Front Door is very easy and fast to set up and implement, if you are looking for an easy solution that is secure and reliable, Front Door does all that and can be configured in a few hours. AFD is a CDN with WAF, accordingly, it is well suited for any CDN Scenario, other providers such as Akamai or Verizon have a more expensive base price and are harder to manage/configure, Front Door is simple, easy, and provides what's needed when it comes to Web App Security. If you have multiple data centers, have apps in different regions, or targeting a global audience, AFD is an excellent option to get up to speed quickly. If you are looking for more features and capabilities, or planning a very complex setup, Front Door might be sufficient, but other specialized provides such as Imperva, Cloudflare or Akamai are generally a bit more advanced (but harder to set up and maintain). It always depends on the scenario, but for us, Front Door was an excellent option and served us very well with no issues.

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