Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Traffic Routing and Failover Strategies

A company is designing a global traffic routing and failover solution for a web application deployed in the East US and West Europe regions. The application must support SSL termination at the global tier and must route traffic to different backend pools based on the URL path. If a regional outage occurs, the solution must fail over to the remaining healthy region in less than 30 seconds. Which two components should you include in the design to meet these requirements? (Select two.)

  1. Azure Front Door to manage global Anycast-based routing, SSL termination, and path-based routing rules.Answer
  2. Azure Application Gateway in each region to manage regional Layer 7 load balancing and secure the web servers.Answer
  3. C
    Azure Traffic Manager to route global traffic and perform SSL offloading at the DNS level.
  4. D
    Azure Traffic Manager configured with URL path-based routing rules to direct traffic to regional endpoints.

Answer

Azure Front Door and Azure Application Gateway
Azure Front Door is a global Layer 7 service that provides Anycast-based routing, SSL offloading, and URL path-based routing rules. Azure Application Gateway is a regional Layer 7 load balancer that handles regional routing, local SSL termination, and secures the workloads locally.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the requirement for global traffic routing with SSL offloading and path-based routing.
Identify that a global Layer 7 load balancer is required. Azure Front Door supports Anycast-based routing, SSL termination, and path-based routing rules, whereas Azure Traffic Manager operates at the DNS level and cannot terminate SSL or inspect URL paths.
This determines the global routing service choice.
2
Evaluate the failover time requirement of less than 30 seconds.
Azure Front Door uses Anycast routing and split TCP to direct traffic to the nearest healthy backend instantly, with fast failover. Azure Traffic Manager relies on DNS TTL, which is subject to client and ISP caching, making sub-30 second failover unreliable.
This confirms the suitability of Azure Front Door over DNS-based routing.
3
Identify the regional Layer 7 load balancing requirement.
Azure Application Gateway can be deployed in each region to manage regional Layer 7 routing, local SSL termination, and provide Web Application Firewall (WAF) protection closer to the backend servers.
This establishes the regional routing layer.

Key Concept

Selecting and configuring Azure load balancing services based on layer, protocol, global/regional scope, and failover capabilities.
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