Azure Frontdoor or traffic manager

Question

Just wanted the recommendations in using azure frontdoor or azure traffic manager for my 2 different web apps hosted on different regions? Can we use both together?

Answer 1

IMHO you should use the one that makes more sense. Traffic Manager you can work with different algorithms when routing to the right region, while Front Door you don't have this flexibility.

On the other hand, Front Door offers some features like Web Application Firewall (WAF) and SSL Offloading that may be interesting in your scenario.

Answer 2

Both Azure front door and traffic manager are deployed in a region agnostic way by azure to help load balance instances between region pairs. If you are hosting web applications using azure app service, the recommend solution for load balancing between regions is Front Door since your traffic is Http(s). (whereas a traffic manager would work nice if you are running virtual machines in different regions and want to load balance between them)

And if you want to further load balance traffic between different web apps in the same region, use an azure application gateway. (your front door directs user traffic to a region, and within that region, the application gateway directs traffic to a healthy web app.)

You can read this for a decision tree of the load balancing options provided by microsoft : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/load-balancing-overview#decision-tree-for-load-balancing-in-azure