Azure Traffic Manager

Hi Guys today we are going to understand about Azure Traffic Manager.

What is Traffic Manager?

So as per the name suggests the traffic manager is used to manage the traffic means distribute the traffic among different servers in the farm or across different regions. It is a kind of DNS-based load balancer. For example there is a company it’s hosted a website and users are across 4 regions like The US, UK, India and Singapore so any one needs to access the website from their locality and the web server hosted in their locality so the users in India will be able to access the website faster as they are nearer to the data-center hosted geographically and similarly the other location people with respect to their particular location. So, in this case the traffic manager is useful to route the traffic by checking the request is from which location and send the request to the nearest location available in order to process the request in a short span of time so this is the user of Traffic manager.

DNS based Traffic:

Consider www.amazon.in (for India) and www.amazon.us (for US) so the .in will be routed to India server and .us will be routed to US server or nearer to locality server if any server nearer to the locality.

Features of Traffic manager:

Availability of the application:

In case of an application hosted across 2 locations and traffic manager installed and maintaining the traffic across the locations so in case of a failure in one of the locations (the locations are known as Endpoints)  the traffic will be routed to the available server so that the application is available 24*7*365 round the globe.

Improved performance of the application:

Traffic manager is helpful in providing better performance of an application so in case of any network latency or network issues so the traffic manager will immediately route the traffic to the next location and serves the request. In short it will send the request where it can be processed in less duration and send the response quickly. Eg:

Service maintenance without downtime:

Traffic manager helps in managing the maintenance activity with ease. If any location server is needing downtime for any upgrade or update so in that case the traffic manager will stop the request incoming to the particular server and send it to the next server. Traffic Manager can direct traffic to alternative endpoints while the maintenance is in progress.

Routing methods of Traffic:

So, the traffic is routed by several methods via the service endpoints the methods are:

·       Priority 

·       Weighted 

·       Performance 

·       Geographic 

·       MultiValue 

·       Subnet 

Priority: It uses are primary service endpoint for all the traffic. It creates a backup endpoint and uses it in case the primary is not working.

Weighted: So in case of weighted it uses an integer value called as weighted from the scale to 1 to 1000 Eg: If there are 3 servers and given weight according to the preference as first server as 20 and second as 46 and so on so always the traffic reaches the first server primarily and in case the endpoint not able to process it will be routed to the next one.

Performance: In case the endpoints are in different locations with help of traffic manager you can make the users hit the closest location endpoint in order to provide better output.

Geographic: So, traffic managers checks from which location request has originated and route to the same location server or nearer one.

MultiValue: In case the traffic is based on IPV4 and IPV6 so when these are queried using DNS you get a healthy response and all the healthy endpoints are returned.

Subnet:  So, based on the subnet from which the users are using it will route to the specific endpoint for which the subnet is supported. When a request is received, the endpoint returned will be the one mapped for that request’s source IP address. 

So, hope this blog will help you to understand the Azure Traffic manager, its features and routing methods. If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Twitter or Facebook. Thank you!