【AZ-301】Azure Architect Design - Traffic Manager

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and responsiveness.

Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method and the health of the endpoints. An endpoint is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure. Traffic Manager provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. Traffic Manager is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

Routing methods

• Priority
  • Select Priority when you want to use a primary service endpoint for all traffic, and provide backups in case the primary or the backup endpoints are unavailable.
• Weighted
  • Select Weighted when you want to distribute traffic across a set of endpoints, either evenly or according to weights, which you define.
• Performance
  • Select Performance when you have endpoints in different geographic locations and you want end users to use the "closest" endpoint in terms of the lowest network latency.
• Geographic
  • Select Geographic so that users are directed to specific endpoints (Azure, External, or Nested) based on which geographic location their DNS query originates from. This empowers Traffic Manager customers to enable scenarios where knowing a user’s geographic region and routing them based on that is important. Examples include complying with data sovereignty mandates, localization of content & user experience and measuring traffic from different regions.
• Multivalue
  • Select MultiValue for Traffic Manager profiles that can only have IPv4/IPv6 addresses as endpoints. When a query is received for this profile, all healthy endpoints are returned.
• Subnet
  • Select Subnet traffic-routing method to map sets of end-user IP address ranges to a specific endpoint within a Traffic Manager profile. When a request is received, the endpoint returned will be the one mapped for that request’s source IP address.

Traffic Manager endpoints types

• Azure endpoints are used for services hosted in Azure.
• External endpoints are used for IPv4/IPv6 addresses, FQDNs, or for services hosted outside - Azure that can either be on-premises or with a different hosting provider.
• Nested endpoints are used to combine Traffic Manager profiles to create more flexible traffic-routing schemes to support the needs of larger, more complex deployments.

Traffic Manager endpoint monitoring

• Protocol Choose HTTP, HTTPS, or TCP as the protocol that Traffic Manager uses when probing your endpoint to check its health. HTTPS monitoring does not verify whether your TLS/SSL certificate is valid--it only checks that the certificate is present.
• Port Choose the port used for the request.
• Path This configuration setting is valid only for the HTTP and HTTPS protocols, for which specifying the path setting is required. Providing this setting for the TCP monitoring protocol results in an error. For HTTP and HTTPS protocol, give the relative path and the name of the webpage or the file that the monitoring accesses. A forward slash (/) is a valid entry for the relative path. This value implies that the file is in the root directory (default).
• Custom header settings This configuration setting helps you add specific HTTP headers to the health checks that Traffic Manager sends to endpoints under a profile. The custom headers can be specified at a profile level to be applicable for all endpoints in that profile and / or at an endpoint level applicable only to that endpoint. You can use custom headers for having health checks to endpoints in a multi-tenant environment be routed correctly to their destination by specifying a host header. You can also use this setting by adding unique headers that can be used to identify Traffic Manager originated HTTP(S) requests and processes them differently. You can specify up to eight header:value pairs seprated by a comma.
• Expected status code ranges This setting allows you to specify multiple success code ranges in the format 200-299, 301-301. If these status codes are received as response from an endpoint when a health check is initiated, Traffic Manager marks those endpoints as healthy. You can specify a maximum of 8 status code ranges. This setting is applicable only to HTTP and HTTPS protocol and to all endpoints. This setting is at the Traffic Manager profile level and by default the value 200 is defined as the success status code.
• Probing interval This value specifies how often an endpoint is checked for its health from a Traffic Manager probing agent. You can specify two values here: 30 seconds (normal probing) and 10 seconds (fast probing). If no values are provided, the profile sets to a default value of 30 seconds. Visit the Traffic Manager Pricing page to learn more about fast probing pricing.
• Tolerated number of failures This value specifies how many failures a Traffic Manager probing agent tolerates before marking that endpoint as unhealthy. Its value can range between 0 and 9. A value of 0 means a single monitoring failure can cause that endpoint to be marked as unhealthy. If no value is specified, it uses the default value of 3.
• Probe timeout This property specifies the amount of time the Traffic Manager probing agent should wait before considering that check a failure when a health check probe is sent to the endpoint. If the Probing Interval is set to 30 seconds, then you can set the Timeout value between 5 and 10 seconds. If no value is specified, it uses a default value of 10 seconds. If the Probing Interval is set to 10 seconds, then you can set the Timeout value between 5 and 9 seconds. If no Timeout value is specified, it uses a default value of 9 seconds.