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Haripriya Veluchamy
Haripriya Veluchamy

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Why Azure Front Door Is My Favorite Global CDN + Load Balancing Service

#azure #devops #cloud #fastapi

When you’re deploying apps in multiple regions, you quickly realize that your setup must solve three major challenges:

  1. Global Traffic Routing
  2. Content Delivery / CDN
  3. Health Checks + Failover

In AWS, this usually requires a combination of services:

  • CloudFront (CDN)
  • Application Load Balancer (ALB)
  • Route 53 (Global DNS routing)
  • Regional EC2 / container backends

These are all great services, but they come with extra wiring and configuration.

💙 Why Azure Front Door Feels Cleaner

Azure Front Door stands out because it combines:

  • Global load balancing
  • Smart routing
  • Built-in CDN
  • Health probes
  • WAF (Web Application Firewall)

…all inside one single service.

In simple words:

👉 What AWS solves using 3–4 services, Azure solves with ONE Azure Front Door.

This makes the architecture simpler, easier to explain, and beginner-friendly.

Let’s break down how it works and what we built.

🔧 Understanding Azure Front Door (with what I built earlier)

Imagine the full path of a user request:

User → Azure Front Door (global edge POP)
      → Routing Rules
      → Origin Group (Region A + Region B)
      → Health Probes
      → VM / App Service / Container backend
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Now let’s walk through the components.

1️⃣ Front Door Endpoint (Global Entry Point)

We created a global endpoint like:

https://shetchuko.azurefd.net
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This endpoint lives on Microsoft’s global edge network and gives:

  • Global caching (CDN)
  • Instant SSL termination
  • DDoS protection

AWS equivalent: CloudFront + Route53.

2️⃣ Origin Groups (Your Regions)

Inside Front Door, we created an Origin Group with:

  • Primary Region (ex: East US)
  • Secondary Region (ex: West Europe)
  • Health probes (/health) to detect failures

AWS equivalent: Route53 health checks + ALB target groups.

3️⃣ Routing Rules

Routing rules in Azure decide:

  • When to cache
  • How to forward API requests
  • Failover policies
  • Compression & caching TTL

Instead of creating separate services, we configured:

  • Route: /api/* → No caching, always hit backend
  • Route: /* → CDN enabled, static content cached
  • Auto-failover between regions

AWS equivalent:
CloudFront behavior + Lambda@Edge rules + Route53 + ALB rules.

4️⃣ CDN Delivery

Static content like:

  • Images
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS

…are cached directly at edge POPs.

This makes the response extremely fast and we didn’t need to deploy a separate “Azure CDN” resource.

AWS equivalent: CloudFront distribution.

5️⃣ Health Probes

Azure Front Door continuously checks origin health using:

  • HEAD / GET method
  • /health endpoint
  • Regional availability

If the primary region is down → it automatically routes traffic to the secondary region.

AWS equivalent: Route53 + ALB health monitors.

🟦 Why I Personally Prefer Azure Front Door

✔️ Integration is smoother

You configure caching, routing, load balancing, failover — all inside one UI panel.

✔️ Easier for beginners

No need to learn 4 different AWS services before building global infra.

✔️ CDN + Load Balancer = Single Billing

You don’t get charged separately for CloudFront, Route53, ALB.

✔️ Better developer experience

Front Door feels like a modern, unified traffic management layer.

✔️ Less YAML & fewer moving parts

AWS requires many policies, listeners, target groups — Azure folds it all into simple rules.

🧩 The Architecture We Built

Step-by-step summary

1. Deploy backend regions

  • VM / App Service in Region A
  • VM / App Service in Region B
  • Health endpoint: /health

2. Create Azure Front Door

  • Create global endpoint
  • Create origin group
  • Add Region A + Region B
  • Enable “priority-based failover”

3. Create Routing Rules

  • Rule 1: /api/* → origin, no caching
  • Rule 2: /* → CDN cache enabled
  • Enable compression
  • Apply caching TTL

4. Configure Health Probes

  • Path: /health
  • Method: HEAD
  • Interval: 30 seconds

5. Add Custom Domain + SSL

  • Map your DNS
  • Azure automatically provisions certificate

6. Test Failover

  • Shut down Region A
  • Traffic automatically moves to Region B

🏁 Final Thoughts

Azure Front Door shines because it gives you:

  • CDN
  • Global load balancing
  • Routing rules
  • WAF
  • Failover
  • Health monitoring

…in a single service.

For multi-region deployments, few platforms make it this easy.

If AWS feels like assembling LEGO pieces…
Azure Front Door feels like a complete box with everything pre-built.

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