Microsoft Azure Networking (Part-2)

Hello again :)

Thanks for following the blog. As we know we have been covering Microsoft Azure Networking resources. This blog is Part - 2 where we continue the Networking resources. If you haven't read the Part 1, click here

Lets understand about Azure Load Balancer and see why anyone should use, Pros and Cons, and finally few examples of the resource in real world.

Azure Load Balancer

1. Layer 4(transport) : TCP & UDP.
2. Routing for virtual machines & cloud services.
3. Support virtual & hybrid networks(on prem/-- -)
4. Supports reserved IP Addresses.
5. Routing based on tuple of source & destination IP addresses.
   • Supports session affinity.
   • Supports port forwarding.

Internet Facing Load Balancer :- Load Balancer passes public IP request to Virtual Machine. Virtual Machine's response is routed back to client through the Load Balancer, onto the public IP.

Internal Facing Load Balancer :- Traffic within the Virtual Network is passed through the Load Balancer.

1. Virtual Machine to Virtual Machine traffic within the same Virtual Network.
2. Virtual Machine to Virtual Machine within the same cloud services(Classic).
3. On-Premises to Virtual Machine within the same cloud services and Virtual Network.
4. Among tiers in a multi-tier Application.

Pros:

1. Flexible & geared towards performance.
2. Can route any UDP/TCP traffic.
3. Create port forwarding & session present rules
4. Direct server return for bandwidth-intensive requests.
5. Allows for tiered routing in N-tier architecture.
6. Correctly addresses sealed out VM instances.
7. Can be used to pool multiple publicIP.
8. Can customize health probes.

Cons:

1. Difficult to be very granular.
2. Doesn’t support SSL offloading.
3. Can be tempting to misuse.
   
   • Too much specific endpoint routing.
   • Stymied auto-scaling.
4. Requires HTTP health probes on each endpoint.
   
   • Endpoint must respond with HTTP 200 status code.

Usage Examples:

1. Load balance each tier of an N-tier architecture with multiple machines.
2. Load balance all traffic on a specific IP address or group of IP addresses.
3. co-ordinate traffic between a Virtual Network and On-Premise Network.
4. Direct traffic on specific port or from a specific IP address to a specific virtual machine.

Thanks for reading.. :) Keep following for Part - 3