Azure Application Gateway
Azure’s Application Gateway service is a load balancer. It allows for the distribution of traffic across multiple servers.
This isn’t a tool we often use at Don’t Panic Labs; we tend to use more of Azure’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) tools. However, Application Gateway is still a handy tool to have in your toolbox.
Why? Sometimes you will have to run software on a VM, but that won’t be possible in a PaaS fashion.
If you have VMs running your software, you will often want more than one instance of that VM for various reasons (such as increased availability and performance).
Setting up Application Gateway is pretty straightforward. We’ll start by creating the service.
This will take us through a few configuration steps.
The first step involves configuring a lot of standard information about the gateway.
The second step is configuring the frontend. For most scenarios, we will need to configure a public IP address.
The third step will be adding a backend pool. These contain the VMs that host our application.
Azure Gateway isn’t something we often use for new software development, but many solutions still need load balancers to be part of the overall solution. Setting up and configuring Azure’s Application Gateway is a great tool to get you started.
