Windows Azure Traffic Manager Basics - azure

I'm working on azure project and came across Azure Traffic Manager. Could someone please help me few question below:
Is Traffic Manager same as load balancer?
Do we need to create Traffic Manager manually or created automatically on webrole deploy.
How do I configure Traffic Manager with new Azure Mgt. Portal?
What is the main purpose of Poll State, as it says offline but I can still access using trafic manager url.
When we get proper CNAME, should CNAME point to this Traffic manager or url provided on Cloud Service > Dashboard?
Thanks.

Is Traffic Manager same as load balancer?
It can be used for failover or load balancing, although only in a round robin way.
Have a look here.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-overview/
Do we need to create Traffic Manager manually or created automatically on webrole deploy.
You need to create it manually.
How do I configure Traffic Manager with new Azure Mgt. Portal?
Currently I believe you can only do it in the old portal.
What is the main purpose of Poll State, as it says offline but I can still access using trafic manager url.
Again easier to read this.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-overview/
When we get proper CNAME, should CNAME point to this Traffic manager or url provided on Cloud Service > Dashboard?
If you want to use traffic manager to manage the traffic you point your CName to the traffic manager url.

Related

Azure - block all traffic from outside the USA

I'm having issues with Russian IP addresses trying to access various areas of my website, that do not exist. I have been hacked before with Ramsonware on AWS. How can I restrict my Azure traffic to just IP addresses in the US?
thx in advance.
You'll need to add a Web Application Firewall (WAF) in front of your web app. You can either use Azure Front Door or Azure Application Gateway and enable WAF, then you just need to setup the geomatch custom rule (which is currently in preview).
More info:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/web-application-firewall/ag/geomatch-custom-rules

How to redirect traffic hosted on an azure endpoint (DNS/static IP) to different external IP address

Question: How do I host an endpoint in azure which allows me to redirect internet traffic at will between azure and aws services?
I am hosting two kubernetes clusters - one in Azure and the other in AWS. I want to be able to:
1. redirect the traffic at will to either aws or azure, whilst retaining the public dns endpoint.
2. fail over manually [and pref automatically too] to the aws cluster. What is the best way to host the endpoint in azure?
Requirements:
The traffic needs to be redirected immediately - no caching issues and stale loads!
Ability to configure failover - i.e. specify that Azure is hot and AWS is the failover service - the traffic should be automatically redirected as soon as Azure goes down.
I have looked at Traffic Manager, Load Balancers and Application Gateway. Not sure which one (if any) of these is best.
traffic manager wont work for you, since its a dns service, so caching will happen (admittedly its the best solution if you set dns cache to 5 seconds or something). application gateway allows you to specify an ip address as an endpoint, load balancers only work when attached to vms inside azure. But application gateways dont allow to failover at will. you would need to block the probe to failover.
Azure Front Door might be the solution for you (like the other answer mentions)
You can have a look into Azure Front Door Service for your usecase.
Look into this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/frontdoor/front-door-overview

Trying to achieve simple fail over for two VMs hosted on Azure

i am running a web-based online application and trying to achieve HA.
i created two windows vmss in an availability set.
All i am looking for is a simple failover protocol, what i am trying to achieve is when my Main Vm is down for any reason,my incoming traffic redirects to my Backup VM till the main vm is up and running again.
I know that Azure Traffic Manager can achieve this by using the Priority type and setting end points for Public Ips that assigned to my vmss.
But the traffic manager is using DNS in order to route traffics, there are some downtown before the traffic manager redirect traffic to my backup vm.
Please check this answer as well for more info why Traffic manager is not the solution. -even when i use fast-intervals settings-
https://stackoverflow.com/a/34469575/10786981
i also can't use load-balancer. As i need the Active/Passive model and load-balancer can't support this model.
A 3rd Load Balancer are expensive and we are really looking in to a simple solution here.

How to set up SSL with custom domains with several App Service behind a Traffic Manager?

I am trying to experiment a little bit the different configuration possibilities in Azure and I am stuck trying to correctly configure SSL custom domains when using more than one Web Site (App Service) behind a Traffic Manager.
Without problem, I was able to:
Attach a custom domain ( subdomain.mydomain.com ) to an Azure App Service ( subdomain1.azurewebsites.net )
Attach a custom domain ( subdomain.mydomain.com ) to an Azure App Service ( subdomain1.azurewebsites.net ) behind a Traffic Manager ( subdomain.trafficmanager.net) (addressed here)
But when I try to add a second App Service behind the Traffic Manager, I get the following issues:
1. Cannot attach my custom domain ( subdomain.mydomain.com ) to the second App Service ( subdomain2.azurewebsites.net ). Error message is:
Failed to update hostname bindings:
The host name subdomain.mydomain.com is already assigned to another Azure website: subdomain1.
I don't understand how SSL will work with the second website if I can't add subdomain.mydomain.com in the list of domains it listens to (and in fact, it doesn't if you don't add it).
2. Cannot add the second App Service to the Traffic Manager's list of endpoints. Error message is:
Failed to save configuration changes to Traffic Manager profile 'mytrafficmanager'.
Error: Some of the provided Azure Website endpoints are not valid: One or more conflicts detected in traffic manager configuration. Multiple domains point to region "West Europe": subdomain1.azurewebsites.net, subdomain2.azurewebsites.net
But when I read the documentation it does seem possible to add more than one endpoint in the same region:
If your profile contains multiple endpoints in the same Azure region, then traffic directed to that region is distributed evenly across the available endpoints (based on the configured endpoint enabled/disabled status and the ongoing endpoint monitoring). If you prefer a different traffic distribution within a region, this can be achieved using nested Traffic Manager profiles.
The example using Traffic Manager and App Service on MSDN's documentation only shows how to do it with one App Service.
Am I doing anything wrong? If yes, what is the right way to add several websites/App Services behind a traffic manager in Azure?
Traffic Manager does support multiple endpoints in the same region. The challenge is that the App Service has restrictions on multiple Apps in the same region sharing the same custom domain. This impacts on Traffic Manager, since the Traffic Manager profile DNS name is automatically added as a custom domain in your apps when adding them to Traffic Manager.
We are in the process of publishing new documentation that covers this exact scenario. Pasting the new text below:
Can I use Traffic Manager with more than one web apps in the same region?
Typically, Traffic Manager is used to direct traffic to applications deployed in different regions. However, it can also be used where an application has more than one deployment in the same region.
In the case of Web Apps, the Traffic Manager ‘Azure Endpoints’ type does not permit more than one Web App endpoint from the same Azure region to be added to Traffic Manager. The following steps provide a workaround to this constraint:
Check that your Web Apps within the same region are in different web app 'scale units', i.e. different instances of the Web App service. To do this, check the DNS path for the <...>.azurewebsites.net DNS entry, the scale unit will look something like ‘waws-prod-xyz-123.vip.azurewebsites.net’. A given domain name must map to a single site in a given scale unit, and for this reason two Web Apps in the same scale unit cannot share a Traffic Manager profile.
Assuming each Web App is in a different scale unit, add your vanity domain name as a custom hostname to each Web App. This requires all Web Apps to belong to the same subscription.
Add one (and only one) Web App endpoint as you normally would to your Traffic Manager profile, as an Azure Endpoint.
Add each additional Web App endpoint to your Traffic Manager profile as an External Endpoint. This requires you to use the ARM experience for Traffic Manager, not ASM.
Create a DNS CNAME record from your vanity domain (as used in step 2 above) to your Traffic Manager profile DNS name (<…>.trafficmanager.net).
Access your site via the vanity domain name, not the Traffic Manager profile DNS name.
Regards,
Jonathan Tuliani, Program Manager, Azure Traffic Manager
Jonathan,
This issue is still confusing when integrating SSL.. I'm not trying to add instances to the same region, but diff regions.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/traffic-manager-how-traffic-manager-works/#traffic-manager-example
This article does a good job of explaining the routing, but minus the SSL..
From the image. Say this is my configuration.. I have a *.contoso.com wildcard SSL. Of the 3 endpoints, contoso-us, contoso-eu, contoso-asia - which one do I install the SSL? Preferably all 3, but I can't set the all to use the custom domain and the SSL..
What am I missing here?

How to expose a website on the new VMs in Azure?

I used to use the "classic" VMs to host test web sites on Azure, but now when I create a VM using the new Azure portal I don't get the option to create a cloud service when I create the VM and can't seem to figure out how to hook up the VM to a cloud service.
My requirement is simple, I have a third party BA web site that I need to install and test. The site gets installed and runs fine locally in IIS but I can't seem to expose it as a ".cloudapp.net" site.
Thanks in advance,
Vince
Cloud services do not exist in the new portal (known as ARM). Instead you should be creating a load balancer or traffic manager resource in front of the VM and then configuring access that way.
A number of considerations will be needed before picking which method to go with, for example traffic manager profiles can only be pointed at Web Apps, classic cloud services or ARM based network adapters on VMs with public IP addresses. Your public IP address must have a DNS name associated with it as well.
For load balancers, you have more options in some areas over traffic manager profiles but it really does depend on your requirements.
Personally I use traffic manager profiles for providing access to IaaS VMs.

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