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Difficulty: MediumApplication Load Balancing and Delivery

A retail company plans to host a customer-facing web portal on Azure Virtual Machines in the West Europe region. The architecture requires a load balancing solution that can perform SSL/TLS termination, route traffic to different backend virtual machines based on the incoming request path (such as /checkout and /products), and support cookie-based session affinity. The backend virtual machines currently have network interfaces associated with Basic SKU public IP addresses.

Which load balancing solution should the company implement to meet these requirements?

  1. Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 utilizing the private IP addresses of the virtual machines in the backend poolAnswer
  2. B
    Azure Standard Load Balancer configured with a backend pool containing the virtual machines
  3. C
    Azure Traffic Manager routing traffic based on performance to the public IP addresses of the virtual machines
  4. D
    Azure Front Door Standard configured with a backend pool pointing directly to the private IP addresses of the virtual machines

Answer

Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 utilizing the private IP addresses of the virtual machines in the backend pool
The correct option is the choice recommending Azure Application Gateway Standard v2. It operates at Layer 7, fulfilling the requirements for SSL/TLS termination, path-based routing, and cookie-based session affinity. Because Application Gateway targets the private IP addresses of the backend virtual machines, it avoids the validation failures that occur when mixing Basic SKU public IP addresses with Standard SKU load balancing resources.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the application layer requirements
The requirements for SSL/TLS termination, URL path-based routing, and cookie-based session affinity dictate a Layer 7 load balancer.
Layer 4 balancers (like Azure Load Balancer) and DNS-based routing (like Traffic Manager) do not inspect application headers and cannot perform these functions.
2
Evaluate the IP SKU constraints of the backend virtual machines
The backend virtual machines have Basic SKU public IP addresses associated with their network interfaces.
This prevents them from being placed in the backend pool of a Standard SKU Load Balancer directly due to the SKU mismatch rule.
3
Select the appropriate regional Layer 7 service that avoids SKU mismatch
Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 connects to backends via private IP addresses, bypassing public IP SKU restrictions.
Since Application Gateway operates in a virtual network and routes to the private IPs of the VMs, it does not conflict with their Basic SKU public IPs.

Key Concept

Selecting Azure Application Gateway to satisfy Layer 7 routing and SSL requirements while avoiding public IP SKU mismatch constraints on backend virtual machines
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Topics

Application Load Balancing and Delivery

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