Can I use azure to deploy custom load balancing algorithm? - azure

Can I use azure to deploy an algorithm for load balancing that I read in one of the research papers? If yes how should i approach the problem and if no then please suggest some alternatives.
Thank you.

Azure provides in-built public and private load balancing and DNS-based routing capabilities (Traffic Manager).
If you want to run your own load balancing infrastructure you can do that but you'd have to run it on Azure Virtual Machines and utilise Virtual Networking to allow you to connect multiple load balanced instances to your load balancer.

For custom load balancing beyond what is available in Traffic Manager, then you'll need to deploy an F5 app and route traffic trough that app to your website.

Related

Migrate load balancing to Azure Application Gateway

I have a standard load balancer existing in our environment and looking for ways to migrate to the Azure Application gateway. What would be the best way to minimize downtime and have a smooth transition?
The only I can see is deploying the application gateway and configure it and then delete the Azure Load balancer
The easiest solution would be to put Application Gateway in front of the Load Balancer and simply use load balancer as a backend. that would be the least disruptive scenario.
After this setup is working you can configure additional backend bypassing the load balancer and remove your load balancer

How to setup a load balancer with x app services

I have two app services (web apps), running the same code, hosted in azure at.
web1.azurewebsites.net and web2.azurewebsites.net (and possibly webN.azurewebsites.net)
I want to have a single web address (for example https://web1.azurewebsites.net or just any web address) and a load balancer that shares the load between them from the incomming requests.
How do I set up this in Azure. I dont understand the terminology and the guides Ive found is old.
Ive managed to create a Load Balancer with a public (dynamic) IP, but I dont know what host name that would answer to, nor how to connected it to my app services)
Could anyone guide me, either just a tutorial (no generic links please), or some step by step instructions how to do it.
If you want to load balance multiple instances of the exact same app service, you can just scale out your app service plan to let Azure create the instances and do the load balancing for you.
If that doesn't work for your situation or you want to load balance across regions, use a Traffic Manager.

can we use load balancer on a two app services in azure

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/

Azure Application Gateway with Service Fabric

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

Traffic manager with multiple endpoints in same location

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!

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