Azure Front Door

Core Functionality

1. Front Door Creation: Create an Azure Front Door profile in the Azure portal. Configure the frontend hosts, backend pools, and routing rules. The frontend hosts represent your application’s public endpoints, while the backend pools contain the servers or services that handle the traffic.
2. Global Load Balancing: Use Azure Front Door’s global load balancing capabilities to distribute traffic across multiple regions. This ensures low latency and high availability by directing users to the nearest or most appropriate backend.
3. SSL Termination: Configure SSL termination to offload SSL processing to Azure Front Door. This reduces the load on your backend servers and simplifies certificate management.
4. Web Application Firewall (WAF): Enable WAF to protect your application from common web vulnerabilities and attacks, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Configure WAF rules to meet your security requirements.
5. Caching and Acceleration: Use Azure Front Door’s caching and acceleration features to improve the performance of your web application. This includes caching static content at edge locations and optimizing the delivery of dynamic content.
6. Monitoring and Diagnostics: Use Azure Monitor and Front Door diagnostics to track the performance and health of your Front Door profile. Set up alerts to notify you of any issues, ensuring proactive management.

Well Architected Framework

Reliability: Ensures continued functionality and quick recovery from failures.

• Design strategies include multiregion deployments (active-active or active-passive models).
• Recommendations emphasize caching, health endpoint monitoring, redundant traffic management, and avoiding session affinity.

Security: Maintains confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

• Key strategies include using Azure Private Link, enabling Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules, DDoS protection, end-to-end TLS, and geo-filtering.

Cost Optimization: Balances functionality and budget requirements.

• Suggestions include using caching, compression, rate-limiting, and choosing appropriate service tiers based on traffic and security needs.

Operational Excellence: Focuses on development, observability, and deployment processes.

• Highlights include leveraging infrastructure as code (IaC), using built-in analytics, automating certificate management, and setting alerts for operational monitoring.

Performance Efficiency: Optimizes user experience under varying loads.

• Emphasizes caching, routing methods, minimizing back-end requests, and enabling compression to reduce latency.

References

• Azure Front Door Overview
• Azure Front Door Features