Currently I have a Service Fabric cluster with 2 stateless services hosting Asp Web APIs. While creating the cluster also appropriate Azure Load Balancers got created.
Now I would like to add Application Gateway in front of my cluster for various reasons like SSL offloading, url-routing etc.
I'd like to understand how to configure the Application Gateway correctly. I see 2 options, not sure which one is valid:
Application Gateway replaces the existing Load Balancer and points directly to SF services hosting WebApi
I keep existing LB configuration and Application Gateway points to this LB (seems like 1 LB solution too many)
Which one is correct? Any advise how to configure?
Approach 2 is what we are using, We have kept the load balancer and that is routing any request received from the Application Gateway. We found this to be easiest and simplest choice, as this involves minimum changes to be done in Application Gateway.
Your two web api's can run on every node in the VM scale set. The Azure Load Balancer is used to distribute traffic over those nodes. Targeting a single service on a single node will reduce scalability and fault tolerance.
You could use the App Gateway to translate incoming request to different ports on the Load Balancer. (E.g. direct traffic to API 1 #url ~/1/ and API 2 #url ~/2/)
Favor using load balancing rules (using all nodes) over NAT redirections (to single nodes). This way you'll have a performant, reliable system.
Solution 2 would also provide possibly to create VPN connection e.g to manage your cluster. Then no need to expose management endpoint to the public. Internal lb also brings on additional features to utilize in the future.
I would go with your first option and to implement it create / modify your ARM template so that it doesn't contain the load balancer and instead contains the application gateway.
Here is a link to the quick starts for ARM templates which you can use. There isn't an out of the box example for service fabric with a gateway but it will give you a great starting place.
link
Related
I have always worked on mobile technologies and now I am stepping into backend systems, more specifically systems design. I keep coming across conflicting statements for the roles of api gateway and load balancer. Googling has only returned the same half a dozen results that mostly focus on the implementations of load balancer or api gateway service provided by some famous service. I will list here all the confusing I am facing, in hope someone can clarify all of them.
Sometimes, i come across that API Gateway is the single point of communication with client devices. On the other hand, some places mention that 'request goes to load balancer, which spreads it across servers equally'. So what is correct? API Gateway receives requests or load balancer?
Other places, when I googled the topic, say that the two are totally different. I've understood that API Gateway does a lot of stuff, like SSL termination, logging, throttling, validation, etc, but it also does load balancing. So API Gateway is a load balancer itself, equipped with other responsibilities?
On the topic, I want to understand if load balancer distribute load among servers of the same cluster or across different data centers or clusters? And what about API Gateway?
What is so specific to api gateway that it is a choice by default for micro-service architecture? Where are API gateways hosted? A DNS resolves domain name to a load balancer or api gateway?
As it might be clear, I am totally confused. In what systems does a load balancer benefit more than API Gateway, if the question is correct.
API Gateway and Load Balancer are 2 different things.
Load Balancer -> Its a software which works at protocol or socket level (eg. tcp, http, or port 3306 etc.) Its job is to balance the incoming traffic by distributing it to the destinations with various logics (eg. Round robin).
I doesn't offer features such as authorisation checks, authentication of requests etc.
Whereas
API Gateway -> Its a managed service provided by various hosting companies to manage API operations to seamlessly scale the API infra.
It takes cares of the access control, response caching, response types, authorisation, authentication, request throttling, data handling, identifying the right destinations based on custom rules, and seamless scaling the backend.
Generally Managed API gateways by default comes with scalable infra, so putting them behind load balancer might not make sense.
About resolving the Domain, most likely always the DNS resolves to the load balancer, which in turn fetches the response from the API gateway service.
DNS -> Load Balancer -> API gateway -> Backend service
Hope I could explain and clear your confusion.
API gateway predominately does API management and provides various other key features such as IAM (Identity and Access Management), Rate limiting, circuit breakers. Hence, it mainly eliminates the need to implement API-specific code for functionalities such as security, caching, throttling, and monitoring for each of the microservice. Microservices typically expose the REST APIs for use in front ends, other microservices and 3rd party apps with help of API gateway.
However, normally, the API Management does not include load balancing function, so it should be used in conjunction with a load balancer to achieve the same.
In system architecture based on Azure, there is Azure Application Gateway which is a load balancer that runs on Layer 7 and provides more features than traditional load balancer ( Layer 4 ) in terms of routing traffic using routing decisions based on additional attributes of HTTP request or content of traffic. This can also be termed as an application load balancer. It shall be used in conjunction by Azure API Management (API gateway). Azure has a Traffic Manager for operating at DNS level which uses DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method and the health of the endpoints. Traffic manager also uses the rules configured at the DNS level and enables dstribution of the the load over multiple regions and data centers. Within every region or data center, there shall be application gateways coupled with load balancers such that, the application gateways shall help in determining the application server to fetch response from and the load balancer shall help in load balancing.
System overview based on Azure :
Here are few related references:
Azure Application Gateway - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/application-gateway-introduction
Azure Load Balancer- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overview
Azure Traffic Manager - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/traffic-manager/traffic-manager-overview
Scenario Architecture - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/traffic-manager/traffic-manager-load-balancing-azure
There are two scenarios to consider here to clarify the confusion. I have clarified this using microservices example as this would make sense there only.
Scenario 1: You have a cluster of API Gateways
User ---> Load Balancer (provided by Cloud Providers like AWS or your own) ---> API Gateway Cluster ---> Service Discovery Agent (like eureka) ---> Microservice A ---> Client Side Load Balancer ---> Microservice B
Scenario 2: You have a single API Gateway
User ---> API Gateway ---> Service Discovery Agent (like Eureka) ---> Microservice A ---> Client Side Load Balancer -> Microservice B
I hope you understand why we required Load Balancer before the API Gateway in Scenario 1, as there we had multiple instances of API gateway also to handle the large traffic and to avoid the burden on the single api gateway since gateway itself can have several tasks to manage as per the requirements, so to distribute the load among them, we have load balancer.
Inside the microservices environment, you may need load balancing concept at multiple places. Like to accept the outside network you will maintain a load balancer provided by Cloud provider like AWS, eureka (Service Discovery) also acts like a load balancer if there are multiple instances of same service are registered with it and at last we also have client side load balancing (each microservice has its own client side load balancer that maintains a local cache) when your microservices are trying to communicate within them just to avoid burden on service discovery agent(eureka) by not checking every time with it the address for the other microservices.
Note: In the flow diagram, please don't confuse the path from API
Gateway --> Service Discovery --> to Microservice as if the Gateway is
forwarding request to Service Discovery that later routes it forward.
Gateway is just checking for the services registry from the Discovery
agents and then routing it to the correct microservice (Not through
the Service Discovery agent)
Load Balancer :
Its main purpose is to distribute by load balancing traffic between multiple back end systems.
We can configure different routes for different back end systems.
We get a static ip address for the load balances end points (usually not available with API gateways)
Can configure health checks (usually not available with API gateways)
In case of cloud providers, usually "Pay for idle as well"
API Gateway :
This as well routes traffic to back end systems based on URL
BUT, its main purpose is targeted towards "API management".
Below are such key features which are usually not available in "Load Balancers",
Can implement rate limiting, bursting limits
Can do request validation and request/response mapping
Usually cloud API gateways allows to export/import cross API platform using swagger spec
Allows caching responses
In case of cloud providers, usually "Pay per use"
DNS is responsible for routing the request to the nearest ip address inside network for a given domain name.
Api gateway is responsible for authentication, finding the correct apis(with or without load balancer) to call and circuit braking, response consolidation.
Load balancer is resposnible for distributing incoming request to different machine having same service deployed on them, on the basis of load or maybe round robin fashion.
So one way of doing it is
DNS TO GATEWAY TO LB
NOTE : LB can be placed before gateway depending upon traffic and use case
I have 2 same Web App and I have added them to application gateway's backed pool in Azure.
I have one domain for the application Gateway and I can bind only one web app to it.
Is there any way to add 2 Web App with the same domain of application gateway?
If not, then any other way to achieve high availability for Web Apps?
I want that if one Web App is not reachable, the traffic should go to other Web App. The Web Apps are not stateless and therefore ruled out the use of Traffic Manager Profile due to lack of Session Persistence.
I have gone through various questions mentioned below on the same topic, but none is related or have satisfactory solution.
- DNS: High Availability with Azure Web Apps + Traffic Manager
- Achieving High Availability using Azure Traffic Manager
- Is it possible that one domain name has multiple corresponding IP addresses?
For App Service, Application Gateway cannot be used for Load balancing Purpose. You can use Application Gateway as WAF. In your scenario, as Thomas stated, AFD would be the best option.
You can leverage the priority option which can be configured while adding App Service to the backend pool to achieve your ask.
You can assign priorities to your different backends when you want to use a primary service backend for all traffic, and provide backups in case the primary or the backup backends are unavailable.
In this case, when the probe to the Primary goes down, then the traffic will be routed to the secondary Web App.
Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-in/azure/frontdoor/front-door-routing-methods
I am creating a network with 2 app services, containing 2 slots each
I know the load balancers are designed to work with VM's, but I am wondering if it is possible to place a load balencer on these 2 app services to balance the load between them, Is it possible to do so??
When you Scale your Web App you add instances of your current pricing tier and Azure deploys your Web App package to each of them.
There's a Load Balancer over all your instances, so, traffic is automatically load balanced between them. You shouldn't need a Virtual Machine for this and you don't need to configure any extra Traffic Manager.
You may want to refer: scale your app in Azure App Service for more details.
but I am wondering if it is possible to place a load balencer on
these 2 app services to balance the load between them, Is it possible
to do so??
According to your description, maybe you are looking for Azure application gateway(layer 7).
Azure application gateway works at the application layer (Layer 7 in the OSI network reference stack). It acts as a reverse-proxy service, terminating the client connection and forwarding requests to back-end endpoints.
Azure application gateway support HTTP, HTTPS and Websockets.
Here is the features offered by each service:
More information about Application gateway, please refer to this article.
Maybe little late but I guess this what you are looking at
Scale Out- A scale out operation is the equivalent of creating multiple copies of your web site and adding a load balancer to distribute the demand between them. When you scale out a web site in Windows Azure Web Sites there is no need to configure load balancing separately since this is already provided by the platform.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/scaling-up-and-scaling-out-in-windows-azure-web-sites/
i have Service fabric Cluster Running on Azure ,i have deployed Application to Service Fabric.
Now i want to use azure Application Gateway on this Scenario like Request First served to Application Gateway and then it migrated to Fabric Load Ba-lancer. I am Quite Confused on this.How to meet above Challenges with ApplicationGateway
I also able to configure ApplicationGateway but dont have IDea how to use it for service fabric
Microsoft Azure Application Gateway offers layer 7 load balancing capabilities, SSL offloading, layer-7 routeing, cookie based session affinity, URL routeing and able to host multiple web application. Azure Application Gateway requires its subnet; sometimes it is confusing if you are not familiar with Azure VNet and Subnet segmentation.
First what you need to understand is the architecture pattern, how Microsoft Application Gateway would play a part in.
I have written some detail series documenting my journey throughout Azure ServiceFabric.
I would suggest you go through these posts, and it will explain Architecture viewpoint for having Application Gateway in front of Service Fabric Cluster.
Irrespective of Application Gateway, you would need Internal Loadbalancer or External Loadbalancer (depends on your topology).
Cloud Architecture Pattern: Azure Service Fabric and Microservices - Part 1 (Physical Architecture)
How to implement Application Gateway with Azure Service Fabric
Also try to understand how it is going to impact, security architecture of your implementation
Also, I would recommend you Reverse proxy in Azure Service Fabric.
Not fully sure your meaning, but you could create sf cluster and related resources using ARM teplates. Thats what I have done. I created appgw, cluster, vmss etc. In the virtualMachinesScalesets networkProfile you must configure the ApplicationGateway back endAddress pool instead of configuring loadBalancerBackendAddressPools. The appgw must exist before vmss deployment. You don't necessarily need lb at all. Appgw can handle the load balancing for you. Even though internal lb would bring in some nice additional features, which you could utilize later on...
I have to admit that these things are quite poorly documented...
I'm trying to add web app endpoints from the same location, to an azure traffic manager, when I try to do this, it tells me that App Service will use load balancing to do this for me, when we apps are in the same location.
My understanding is that load balancing is for distributing requests between multiple VMs on one web app. The plan was to use out single DNS and allow traffic manager to determine which endpoint to go to using round-robin or failover. How will load balancing know to direct to one of the web apps from this single address?
Azure Web Apps already have built in load balancing between instances within the web app. So for example if you have a web app with 10 instances under the endpoint: tester.azurewebsites.net, Azure load balances appropriately across those instances.
When you bring in traffic manager, that is looking for different endpoints to facilitate between. Incoming requests will be routed based on proximity to endpoints it is managing, load and if the endpoint is available. Traffic Manager takes care of all of those complexities for you.
This allows you to have a single endpoint myapp.azurewebsites.net; which may route to myapp-west.azurewebsites.net and myapp-east.azurewebsites.net. That routing as I indicated is based on proximity, load and availability.
How it actually works is the magic sauce of Azure Traffic Manager. I use it in production and it has been working very well for me. I primarily use it for routing based on proximity, and have yet to experience a failure on a web app to test a production failover reroute.
Hope that helps!