Azure Traffic Manager

Microsoft Azure Traffic Manager allows you to control the distribution of user traffic to your specified endpoints, which can include Azure cloud services, websites, and other endpoints. Traffic Manager works by applying a policy engine to Domain Name System (DNS) queries for the domain names of your Internet resources. Your Azure cloud services or websites can be running in different datacenters across the world.

Characteristic:

Improves availability
Traffic manager improves the availability of the applications by providing automatic failover capabilities when an Azure cloud service, Azure website goes down.

Reduce latency
Traffic manager improves the responsiveness of your application and content delivery by directing end-users to the endpoint with the lowest network latency from the client.

Scaling up across the globe
Traffic manager help your application to scale across various Azure data centre across the globe and load balance traffic across the varied region endpoints

Traffic distribution for large, complex deployments
Traffic Manager supports the nested profile, which you would need to create configurations to optimize performance and distribution for larger, more complex deployments

How do you create one?
Create Traffic Manager on the Web
Now, you need to give the DNS name for the traffic manager It would be example.trafficmanager.net and you choose the load balancing method.

Performance – Shortest latency between the region

Round Robin – Equal distribute traffic across the region

Failover – DR scenarios

Performance – When you choose Performance, Microsoft maintains the latency table in the routes, which guides the latency with the various data centre. It is not real-time, but pretty quick to find the shortest latency from the point.

Failover – All connection to one set of server and if failover, then it sends connections to the second set of server. This can be changed later on, once you define the traffic manager Click on the Configure Tab You can configure the Endpoints for the Traffic Manager, where you can add websites, or add Webapps to the site. In the Configuration tab, you can change the load balancing method, you can use PowerShell to create nested Traffic manager profile.

You can mask the DNS with the CNAME, which mask the *.trafficmanger.net URL with your DNS URL.