Ken Muse

Comparing Azure Front Door to Other Services


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