If I deploy a web app (formerly known as an Azure WebSite) to an App Hosting Plan in Azure with a couple of instances (scale = 2) will the load balancer in front of the instances care if any of the instances is unhealthy?
I'm troubleshooting an issue that sometimes causes my site to return an http 503 ~50% of the time. My thinking here is that one of two of my instances has failed but the load balancer hasn't noticed.
If the load balancer does care, what does it look for? I can't find anyway to specify a ping url, for instance.
Note: this question has nothing to do with Traffic Manager.
Yes, Azure Web Apps monitors the health of the workers by making internal requests to it and verifying that they're healthy.
However, we don't check status codes that the web app returns to user requests (like 500, etc) since that could easily be an app specific issue rather than a problem with the machine.
So the answer you're looking for is: We continuously test whether or not the instances (VMs) are healthy and take them down if they're not. However, those tests do not rely on error codes the customer's site returns
Related
Is there a way to exclude an AppService instance from the Load Balancer:
Via the portal?
Via the SDK?
Via the SDK would be ideal, then we could set the MakeVisibleToLoadBalance flag (if such a thing existed) once all initialization completed.
If it's only available via the portal, it would be good to set n seconds after an instance is loaded before it becomes visible to the load balancer.
Reason:
When we restart an instance (e.g. via advanced restart), the metrics show a significant increase in response times, every time.
I believe the cause is the load balancer thinks the machine is available but it really hasn't completed initialization, so requests that the load balancer sends to that instance are significantly delayed.
Another reason is we may observe an instance is performing poorly, it would be great if we could exclude that instance until either it recovered or was restarted.
//As per the discussion with wallismark in the 'comments'. Copied the helpful comments to answer.
To fix the 'reason'/scenarios you have mentioned above, you could leverage ApplicationInitialization method. Every time your application starts, this can be because of a new worker coming online (horizontal scaling) or even just a cold start caused by a new deployment, config change etc. The ApplicationInitialization will be executed to warm up the site before accepting requests on that worker.
So the Application Initialization Module, handy feature that allows you to warm your app prior to the application receiving requests to help avoid the cold-start or slow initial load times when the app is restarted. Please checkout - https://ruslany.net/2015/09/how-to-warm-up-azure-web-app-during-deployment-slots-swap/
- It has also been implemented for all other operations in which a new worker is provisioned (such as auto scale, manual scale or Azure fabric maintenance). But, you cannot exclude the instance from the load balancer.
If your requirement fits, you could leverage ARR affinity; in a multi-instance deployment, ensures that the client is routed to the same instance for the life of the session. You can set this option to Off for stateless applications.
Typically, the Scale-out (trigger) -multiple running copies of your WebApps and handle the load balancing configurations necessary to distribute incoming requests across all instances. When you have more than one instance a request made to your WebApp can go to any of them using a load-balancer that will decide which instance to route the request based on how busy each instance is at the time.
To share more information on this feature - On load-balancer is that once a request from your browser is made to the site, it will add a ARRAffinity cookie to it (with the response) containing the specific instance id that will make the next request from this browser go to the same instance. You can use this feature to send a request to a specific instance of our site. You can find the setting in the App Service's Application Settings:
When multiple apps are run in the same App Service plan, each scaled-out instance runs all the apps in the plan.
I have a web application that is currently running on IIS in 3 Azure VMs. I have been working to make my application App-Services friendly, but would like to test the migration to App-Services in a safe / controlled environment.
Would it be possible to spin up the App-Service and use an Azure Load Balancer to redirect a percentage of traffic off the VM and onto the App-Service?
Is there any other technology that would help me get there?
You might be able to achieve this if you are using an App Service Environment and an internal load balancer
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/environment/app-service-environment-with-internal-load-balancer
However, based on your description of your current setup I don't believe there is an ideal solution for this as a standard load balancer only allows for the backend ports to map to VMs. Using an Application Gateway might be another option as well
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/
I would suggest you make use of the deployment and production slots available that comes a Web App. Once you have the webapp running in the dev slots, test the site to ensure all works as expected. Once it does, switch it to the production slot and reroute all traffic from the VMs to the App Service.
All in all, running an app on a Web App is quite simple. Microsoft takes away the need to manage the VM settings so you can simply deploy and run. I don't see you having any issues simply migrating. The likelihood for issues is small. You can also minimalism it by performing the migration during off hours in case you need to make any changes.
There is also some Web App migration guidance you might find useful
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/azure/dotnet-howto-choose-migration?view=azure-dotnet
I have one Azure App Service in which I have created 5 instances using App Service Plan
Scale Out option. Now I am not sure how does Azure load balances requests between this instances? I am not seeing any load balancer for it.
Also how can I know that which request is being served by which instance?
The load balancer is created automatically and you can't see it.
Basically it sends the requests to instances at random, though it can be made "sticky" with ARR Affinity.
You can find the setting in the App Service's Application Settings:
If it is on, the load balancer will attach a cookie to responses if they don't already have it.
It makes it so that future requests hit the same instance.
Though of course if the instance is no longer there (because of auto-scale for example), then it will again go to a random instance.
The WEBSITE_INSTANCE_ID environment variable can tell you in the back-end which instance is handling the request.
You can find a list of available variables here: https://github.com/projectkudu/kudu/wiki/Azure-runtime-environment
We deployed a Node.js Azure Web App and defined a minimum of 2 instances (for scalability and high-availability).
It seems like the LB is balancing the load between the instances, but it doesn't react on instance error (crash) and seems to insist balancing the load between all the instances including the one which crashed.
Is there a way to set a fail-over mechanism for high-availability?
The load balancer used by Azure App Service will continue to send requests to individual web servers as long as the underlying virtual machines are up and running.
To workaround the issue you are running into, you can try configuring the "auto-heal" feature. If the scenario is that the app gets "stuck" in a permanently broken state, auto-heal rules can be configured to automatically restart the app.
More details on auto-heal here:
Auto-heal for Azure Web Sites
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!