Azure Traffic Manager Overview

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that allows you to distribute traffic optimally to your services, hosted in different datacenters. Traffic Manager enables you to provide high availability and responsiveness to your customers by directing their traffic to the lowest-latency endpoint in a given region. It also allows for seamless failover by automatically directing traffic to a secondary location if it is detected that your primary location is unavailable.

Key Features and Benefits

• High Availability: Ensure your applications remain accessible even during datacenter outages or planned maintenance. Traffic Manager can automatically failover traffic to healthy endpoints.
• Performance Optimization: Route users to the endpoint that provides the best performance based on their geographical location and network latency.
• Hybrid Cloud Scenarios: Integrate Traffic Manager with your on-premises infrastructure to manage hybrid cloud deployments.
• Multiple Traffic Routing Methods: Choose from various intelligent routing methods to suit your specific needs, including Priority, Weighted, Performance, Geographic, and Multivalue.
• DNS-based Load Balancing: Operates at the DNS level, making it transparent to applications and users.

How Traffic Manager Works

Traffic Manager works by using DNS. When a client requests a resource from your application (e.g., www.example.com), the DNS query is sent to Traffic Manager. Traffic Manager then examines the query and uses the configured routing method to return the IP address of the most appropriate endpoint. The client then connects directly to that endpoint. This process is repeated for each client request, ensuring that traffic is always directed effectively.

Traffic Routing Methods Explained

1. Priority: Use this method to perform a graceful degradation of services. For example, you can direct all traffic to your primary datacenter, but if that datacenter is down, automatically failover to a secondary datacenter.
2. Weighted: Distribute traffic across a set of endpoints with specific weights. This is useful for testing new versions of your application or for managing traffic during migrations.
3. Performance: Route users to the endpoint with the lowest network latency. This ensures the best possible performance for your users. Traffic Manager determines latency by probing your endpoints from various locations around the world.
4. Geographic: Route traffic to specific endpoints based on the geographic location of the user's DNS query. This is ideal for meeting data sovereignty requirements or for delivering content from a location close to your users.
5. Multivalue: Returns multiple healthy endpoints in DNS query. This allows a client to try a different endpoint if one fails. This is useful for failover, but not for load balancing.

Common Use Cases

• Disaster Recovery: Implement a robust disaster recovery strategy by directing traffic to a secondary region in case of a primary region failure.
• Global Application Deployment: Deploy your application globally and use Traffic Manager to serve users from the closest and fastest available datacenter.
• Scheduled Maintenance: Take down endpoints for maintenance by reconfiguring Traffic Manager profiles, ensuring minimal disruption to users.
• Hybrid Cloud Load Balancing: Extend your on-premises load balancing to Azure cloud services.

By intelligently directing traffic, Azure Traffic Manager plays a crucial role in building resilient and high-performing applications on Azure.

To learn more about configuring and managing Traffic Manager, please refer to the following sections in our documentation.

Next Steps:

• Understand Traffic Routing Methods
• Learn how to Create a Traffic Manager Profile