Last updated on March 15, 2021
It’s not really called ‘Azure Front Door Vanilla’ but as of last week there are now three versions of Azure Front Door (AFD) available.
- Azure Front Door,
- Azure Front Door Standard (Preview),
- Azure Front Door Premium (Preview).
Azure Front Door has been around since its own public preview in Sept 2018 although its history dates back significantly further than that within Microsoft own infrastructure serving Office 365, Bing, LinkedIn, etc.
Azure Front Door utilises Microsoft’s global network, which includes datacentre and edge locations around the globe, to deliver a global, scalable, and resilient entry-point get your information to your audience as quickly as possible, regardless of location.
Not just a Content Delivery network – working at the application layer (Layer 7) Front Door will either respond to the client request if caching is enabled or it will route the client to the fastest and most available internet facing back-end.
The key features of Front Door are:
- Accelerated application performance by using split TCP-based anycast protocol.
- Intelligent health probe monitoring for backend resources.
- URL-path based routing for requests.
- Enables hosting of multiple websites for efficient application infrastructure.
- Cookie-based session affinity.
- SSL offloading and certificate management.
- Define your own custom domain.
- Application security with integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF).
- Redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS with URL redirect.
- Custom forwarding path with URL rewrite.
- Native support of end-to-end IPv6 connectivity and HTTP/2 protocol.
So, what do you mean by ‘Vanilla’ and what is new in Front Door Standard/Premium?
Microsoft have introduced two new ‘flavours’ of Front Door into Public Preview with Azure Front Door Standard (Preview) and Azure Front Door Premium (Preview).
Azure Front Door Standard/Preview combines three services – Azure Front Door with Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Azure Front Door Standard is optimised for content delivering both static and dynamic content acceleration, global load balancing, SSL offload, domain and certificate management, enhanced traffic analytics, along with basic security capabilities.
Azure Front Door Premium extended the capabilities of Front Door Standard, and adds extensive security capabilities such as WAF, BOT protection, Azure Private Link support, integration with Microsoft Threat Intelligence, and security analytics.
As well as these additional benefits an application origin can now exist outside of Azure – either on-prem or other cloud services.
Further Reading:
Azure Front Door Standard/Premium | Microsoft Docs
Azure Front Door enhances secure cloud CDN with intelligent threat protection | Azure Blog and Updates | Microsoft Azure
NOTE: Azure Front Door Standard/Premium (Preview) is currently in public preview. This preview version is provided without a service level agreement, and it’s not recommended for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities.
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