Trying to understand the features of the various routing and load balancing services? WIth so many options, it can be tough to decide on the right Azure service to use for routing or load balancing. This short table should help you out. It briefly compares some of the key features of the services to assist you in determining which service to use for which purpose. Don’t forget — services can be combined if you need multiple sets of features. That set, you will generally NOT want to use both two global services together.
| Feature | Front Door | Traffic Manager | Application Gateway | Load Balancer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Layer | 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) | 7 (DNS) | 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) | 4 (TCP/UDP) |
| Location | Global | Global | Regional | Regional (+preview) |
| SSL termination | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Session affinity | Cookie | No | Cookie | Client IP (+Protocol) |
| Peering support | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Routing | Latency, Priority, Weighted, Session affinity, Rules | Priority, Weighted, Performance, Geographic, Multi-value, Subnet | Rules | Hash, Client IP, Client IP + Protocol |
| Private Link | Yes (Premium) | No | Preview | Yes |
| Web App Firewall | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Connection Drain | No | No | Yes | No |