A global company needs to host a new web application that must be highly available and resilient to regional outages. They want to ensure that if one Azure region becomes unavailable, users are automatically directed to a healthy instance of the application in another region with minimal downtime. Which Azure service should they use to achieve this automatic global failover?
- AAzure Load Balancer
- BAzure Traffic Manager
- CAzure Application Gateway
- DAzure Front Door
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: D. Azure Front Door
Azure Front Door is a global, scalable entry-point that uses the Microsoft global edge network to create fast, secure, and widely scalable web applications. It provides dynamic site acceleration, global HTTP(S) load balancing, and application-level security, including automatic global failover to the closest available backend. While Traffic Manager can do DNS-based failover, Front Door operates at layer 7 (HTTP/S) and offers more advanced features like WAF and SSL offloading.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Azure Load Balancer is a regional, Layer 4 load balancer, distributing traffic within a single Azure region.
- B. Azure Traffic Manager provides DNS-based global load balancing and failover, but Azure Front Door offers more advanced application-layer features and performance optimizations.
- C. Azure Application Gateway is a regional, Layer 7 load balancer, not designed for global failover across regions.
Azure Front Door
A global, scalable entry-point that uses the Microsoft global edge network to create fast, secure, and widely scalable web applications. It provides dynamic site acceleration, global HTTP(S) load balancing, and application-level security.
- Global HTTP/S load balancing and failover.
- Dynamic site acceleration for improved performance.
- Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities.
- SSL offloading and end-to-end SSL.
Memory trick: Front Door is your global entry, Traffic Manager is your global signpost.