Table of Contents
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. As an integral component for deploying web applications, Application Gateway offers various layer 7 load balancing capabilities for Azure. When preparing for the AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator exam, understanding how to configure Azure Application Gateway is key. The configurations cover creating the Application Gateway, configuring routing rules, backend pools, health probes, and listeners.
The Application Gateway must be part of a virtual network. You can either select an existing VNet or create a new one. Generally, a dedicated subnet is created just for the Application Gateway.
You can assign either a public or a private IP address. Public IPs are used when the application needs to be accessible from the internet, while private IPs are used for internal-only access.
Backend pools are the groups of servers that will serve the traffic for the Application Gateway.
Create a backend pool by assigning it a name and adding backend targets, which can be virtual machines, IP addresses, or fully qualified domain names (FQDNs).
Targets can be added to the backend pool that the Application Gateway will route traffic to. These are often your web servers or applications.
Listeners are essential to determine how the Application Gateway should respond to incoming traffic.
For multi-site hosting, SNI (Server Name Indication) enables the Application Gateway to host multiple secure websites with a single listener.
Routing rules determine the path of the traffic from the listener to the backend pool.
Assign a name for the rule and select the listener that it applies to.
Choose the backend pool that the rule should route the traffic to.
Configure how the Application Gateway communicates with the backend servers. It includes settings like HTTP or HTTPS protocol, cookie-based affinity, and connection draining.
Health probes are used to monitor the health of the backend servers.
Once created, assign these probes to the corresponding HTTP settings that are used by the routing rules.
After configuring the Application Gateway, validate the settings and perform any necessary configurations and scaling considerations. Then, you can proceed to create the Application Gateway.
Azure Application Gateway also includes an array of advanced features, such as URL-based routing, redirection, session affinity, WebSocket support, and more. These features offer granular control over web application traffic and enhance the user experience.
Post-deployment, monitoring is crucial for maintaining the Application Gateway. Azure provides metrics and logs that should be observed to ensure the Application Gateway operates as intended. In the case of outages or performance issues, the metrics can help identify and resolve problems quickly.
When configuring the Application Gateway, consider the expected load and performance requirements. Azure Application Gateway offers auto-scaling in the Standard_v2 and WAF_v2 tiers, allowing it to scale automatically based on the current traffic load.
In summary, configuring Azure Application Gateway involves setting up frontend IP configurations, backend pools, HTTP settings, listeners, routing rules, and health probes. The system should be constantly monitored and managed to ensure optimal performance and availability. Understanding these steps and effectively implementing them is essential for the AZ-104 Microsoft Azure Administrator exam.
Answers to multiple choice questions:
False: Azure Application Gateway supports URL-based content routing.
B: Load balancing HTTP and HTTPS traffic.
C: SSL termination.
A: True. To enable the WAF feature, you must use the v2 SKU.
E: Both B and D – Auto-scaling is available in Standard_v2 and WAF_v2 SKUs.
D: NAT gateway is not a component of Azure Application Gateway.
A: True. Azure Application Gateway can be integrated with Azure Traffic Manager for geographic routing.
A: Blob storage is required to store access logs.
B: False. Azure Application Gateway can route traffic based on other attributes like URI path and host headers, not just the originating IP.
C: Backend HTTP settings should be set up to determine the response wait time before considering a backend failure.
Explanation: Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI can be used to configure and manage Azure Application Gateway, providing a command-line approach to administration.
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications.
The key features of Azure Application Gateway include SSL termination, URL-based routing, multi-site routing, session affinity, Web Application Firewall (WAF), and autoscaling.
SSL termination is the process of decrypting HTTPS traffic at the Application Gateway and forwarding it to the backend pool over HTTP. It helps offload the compute-intensive task of SSL decryption from the backend servers.
URL-based routing enables you to route traffic based on the URL path of the incoming request. You can create routing rules that match specific URL paths and forward traffic to different backend pools.
Multi-site routing enables you to host multiple websites on a single Application Gateway. You can define multiple listeners and routing rules that match different hostnames and route traffic to different backend pools.
Session affinity (also known as sticky sessions) ensures that a user’s requests are always routed to the same backend server in a backend pool. This can improve application performance and user experience.
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a feature of Azure Application Gateway that helps protect your web applications from common web vulnerabilities and attacks.
Autoscaling is a feature of Azure Application Gateway that automatically scales the gateway instances up or down based on the incoming traffic.
The prerequisites for deploying Azure Application Gateway include a virtual network, subnet, public IP address, and backend servers.
No, Azure Application Gateway can only be deployed within a single region.
Yes, Azure Application Gateway can be used for both HTTP and HTTPS traffic as well as for TCP traffic.
Yes, Azure Application Gateway can be used with AKS to expose your Kubernetes services to the internet or to other virtual networks.
You can monitor Azure Application Gateway using Azure Monitor, which provides a range of metrics and logs to help you understand the performance and health of the gateway.
The pricing model for Azure Application Gateway is based on the number of gateway instances and data processing rates.
The maximum number of listeners and rules that can be configured in Azure Application Gateway depends on the selected SKU and the number of gateway instances.
If this material is helpful, please leave a comment and support us to continue.