13. Azure Front Door and Azure CDN

Several networking services in Microsoft Azure are dedicated to application delivery. Azure Front Door and Azure CDN are services that allow us to create applications for global delivery and take advantage of the global network of Azure datacenters. Leveraging this capability, we can provide the same experience to our users, irrespective of their physical location.

We will cover the following recipes in this chapter:

• Creating an Azure Front Door instance
• Creating an Azure CDN profile

Technical requirements

For this chapter, the following is required:

• An Azure subscription

Creating an Azure Front Door instance

Azure Front Door is used for the global routing of web traffic for applications distributed across different Azure regions. With Azure Front Door, we can define, manage, and monitor the routing of our web traffic and enable quick global failover. It enables us to deliver our applications with the best performance and high availability. Azure Front Door is an L7 load balancer, similar to Application Gateway. However, there is a difference as regards global distribution. In terms of global distribution, it is similar to another service—Traffic Manager. Essentially, Azure Front Door combines the best features of Application Gateway and Traffic Manager—the security of Application Gateway and the distribution capability of Traffic Manager.

Getting ready

Azure Front Door requires services that will be added to the backend pool. You can use a script from the Getting ready section of the Adding an endpoint recipe, under Chapter 11,...

Creating an Azure CDN profile

Azure Content Delivery Network (Azure CDN) is a distributed network that enables the faster delivery of web content to end users. Azure CDN stores cached content on edge servers in multiple locations (Azure regions). This content is then available to end users faster, with minimal network latency.

Getting ready

Before you start, open the browser and go to the Azure portal via https://portal.azure.com.

How to do it…

In order to create a new Azure CDN profile, take the following steps:

1. In the Azure portal, select Create a resource and then choose CDN under Networking (or search for CDN in the search bar).
2. In the new pane, we must provide information for the Name, Subscription, Resource group, and Pricing tier fields. If we decide to provide a CDN endpoint at this time, we need to provide details for CDN endpoint name, Origin type, and Origin hostname. Origin hostname will be available from the drop-down list, based on the Origin...