As part of my Azure feature series lets take a look at Front Door.
What is it?
Azure Front Door Service provides a scalable and secure entry point for fast delivery of your global web applications.
This essentially means that by placing a Front Door ahead of your application you gain increased performance and security.
Getting started
Setting up is straight forward, if you’d like to test Front door and you don’t have an application to use you can setup a sample web app using my previous article here .
First click New Resource in your Azure Portal and search for Front Door, then click Create
Choose your subscription ,resource group and Azure region. then click Next: Configuration
Now it’s a simple three step process
- Add a frontend host
- Configure backend pools
- Configure routing rules
Adding a Frontend Host
Click the + icon in the corner of the frontend host window and give you frontdoor a name and enable Session Affinity if required.
Adding a Backend Pool
Next click the + icon in the corner of the backend pool window. Give your pool a name, configure your load balancing and then click on add a backend.
Backend hosts can be various types in this example we are using an App Service, you can also use Cloud Service, Storage, Storage(Classic) or Custom host. Select your Subscription and backend host and click add and then add again.
Adding Routing Rules
Next click the + icon in the corner of the routing rules window. Give your rule a name, decide if it must accept HTTP or HTTPS or both and select your frontend host. Next configure the forwarder and enable caching if required, if your app uses lots of static content this will drastically improve load time performance, then click add.
click Review + Create and then Create
You should now be able to access your application using the frontdoor URL available on the top right hand side of the Overview blade.
How much better is it?
Below we have two speed test results one for my webapp API and one for my Frontdoor we can see a 53% improvement from 1.33 seconds to 710 milliseconds.
Webapp Load Test
Frondoor Load Test
