- Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic for service endpoints in different datacenters.
- Service endpoints supported by Traffic Manager include Azure VMs, Web Apps, and Cloud Services.
- You can also use it with external, non-Azure endpoints.
- It uses the DNS to direct client requests to the most appropriate endpoint based on a traffic-routing method and the health of the endpoints.
- It provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models.
- It is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.
Applications
- Improve availability of critical applications:
- It delivers high availability for your applications by monitoring your endpoints and providing automatic failover when an endpoint goes down.
- Improve responsiveness for high-performance applications
- Azure allows you to run cloud services or websites in datacenters located around the world.
- Traffic Manager improves application responsiveness by directing traffic to the endpoint with the lowest network latency for the client.
- Perform service maintenance without downtime
- You can perform planned maintenance operations on your applications without downtime.
- Traffic Manager directs traffic to alternative endpoints while the maintenance is in progress.
- Combine on-premises and Cloud-based applications
- Traffic Manager supports external, non-Azure endpoints
- It can be used with hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments, including the "burst-to-cloud," "migrate-to-cloud," and "failover-to-cloud" scenarios.
- Distribute traffic for large, complex deployments
How It Works
- Azure Traffic Manager enables you to control the distribution of traffic across your application endpoints.
- An endpoint is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure.
- Traffic Manager provides two key benefits:
- Distribution of traffic according to one of several traffic-routing methods.
- Continuous monitoring of endpoint health and automatic failover when endpoints fail.
- When a client attempts to connect to a service, it must first resolve the DNS name of the service to an IP address.
- The client then connects to that IP address to access the service.
- Traffic Manager works at the DNS level.
- Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct clients to specific service endpoints based on the rules of the traffic-routing method.
- Clients connect to the selected endpoint directly.
- Traffic Manager is not a proxy or a gateway.
- Traffic Manager does not see the traffic passing between the client and the service.
