Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables users to manage traffic for their web applications effectively. Unlike traditional load balancers that work at Layer 4 of the OSI model and route traffic based only on source IP address and port, Azure Application Gateway operates at Layer 7, the application layer. This allows it to make more intelligent routing decisions based on attributes such as HTTP headers, URI paths, and host names. Azure Application Gateway is specifically designed to offer advanced routing capabilities that improve both the performance and security of web applications deployed in the Azure cloud infrastructure.
The Application Gateway not only helps in balancing incoming traffic among servers but also provides essential features like SSL termination, web application firewall integration, and session affinity, among others. These features make it a robust and versatile solution for modern cloud-based web applications. It supports high availability, scalability, and better performance optimization while offering centralized control over web traffic routing.
Understanding how Azure Application Gateway functions, its components, and its capabilities is essential for organizations planning to build or migrate applications to a more scalable and secure architecture. This section will help lay the groundwork for a deeper understanding of its functionalities and how it is different from traditional load balancing techniques.
The Need for Azure Application Gateway
In the modern digital economy, the need for secure, high-performing, and scalable web applications is paramount. Enterprises, retailers, and service providers are increasingly relying on web-based platforms for critical business functions, including financial transactions, customer relationship management, content delivery, and more. With the rapid expansion of digital touchpoints, traditional infrastructure has become insufficient to handle the complexity, volume, and security demands of today’s applications.
Legacy systems built using outdated technologies like classic Active Server Pages (ASP) and hosted on Windows Server 2003 were not only limited in terms of scalability and performance but also failed to meet modern compliance and security standards. These systems typically ran on single-instance servers with limited memory and processing power, using outdated database systems like Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Furthermore, they lacked support for key features such as dynamic scaling, high availability, and secure communication protocols. In many cases, there was little to no documentation available for custom-built components, which made system maintenance and upgrades both difficult and risky.
As a result, many organizations started exploring alternatives that offered enhanced capabilities, particularly in terms of security, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Azure Application Gateway emerged as a powerful solution to these challenges. By leveraging cloud-based infrastructure, it eliminates the dependency on physical servers, offers built-in compliance with industry standards, and reduces operational complexity.
Moreover, Azure Application Gateway is specifically designed to handle the needs of modern applications, including the ability to terminate SSL sessions at the gateway level, which reduces the computational load on backend servers. This not only improves response times but also frees up backend resources for application-specific tasks.
In scenarios that involve processing sensitive information, such as online payments, healthcare records, or legal data, secure communication is non-negotiable. Azure Application Gateway supports end-to-end TLS encryption, ensuring that data remains encrypted throughout its journey from client to backend server. This is crucial for maintaining data integrity and confidentiality, as well as for complying with regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Another compelling reason for adopting Azure Application Gateway is its ability to support seamless autoscaling. Traditional infrastructures often require manual intervention to add or remove resources, which leads to inefficiencies and potential downtime. In contrast, Application Gateway can automatically adjust its capacity based on real-time traffic patterns, ensuring optimal performance during traffic spikes and cost savings during low-traffic periods.
Core Concepts and Architecture
Azure Application Gateway is composed of several interrelated components that together provide comprehensive traffic management capabilities. At its core, it acts as a reverse proxy that routes client requests to one or more backend servers based on defined rules. This architecture enables a high degree of customization and control over how traffic is handled and ensures that the system remains flexible enough to meet diverse application requirements.
The most fundamental components of Azure Application Gateway include the frontend IP configuration, listeners, routing rules, backend pools, and health probes. Each of these components plays a specific role in managing and directing incoming web traffic.
The frontend IP configuration defines how users connect to the Application Gateway. It supports both public and private IP addresses, enabling it to handle traffic from the internet as well as internal network sources. When a request is received, it is processed by a listener, which is a logical entity configured with a specific protocol and port combination. The listener evaluates incoming requests and forwards them to the appropriate backend pool based on the configured rules.
Routing rules are another key component of the Application Gateway architecture. These rules define how requests are matched and directed to specific backend servers. They can be based on multiple criteria, including HTTP methods, URI paths, and header values. This enables developers to implement complex traffic-routing scenarios, such as sending all requests containing “/images” in the URL to a specific set of servers optimized for image processing.
The backend pool consists of one or more servers that host the actual web application. These servers can be part of virtual machine scale sets, virtual machines, or even containers, depending on the specific deployment model. Each backend server is regularly monitored using health probes to ensure that it is functioning correctly. If a server is found to be unhealthy, it is temporarily removed from the pool to prevent failed requests.
Another essential component of the Azure Application Gateway is its Web Application Firewall or WAF. This security feature provides protection against common web vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other OWASP top 10 threats. The WAF can operate in detection or prevention mode and can be configured with custom rules to meet specific security requirements.
SSL termination is another critical capability offered by Azure Application Gateway. It allows the gateway to decrypt incoming HTTPS requests before forwarding them to backend servers over HTTP. This reduces the computational load on backend servers and simplifies certificate management. For scenarios where end-to-end encryption is required, the gateway also supports re-encrypting the traffic before sending it to the backend.
Common Use Cases and Examples
To better understand how Azure Application Gateway can be utilized in real-world scenarios, consider a hypothetical example involving a media streaming platform that serves millions of users worldwide. The platform hosts various types of content, including images, videos, and text-based articles. Each type of content has different processing and storage requirements, and therefore, is hosted on separate backend infrastructure.
Using Azure Application Gateway, the platform can define routing rules that send image requests to one set of servers, video requests to another, and article requests to a third set. This approach optimizes resource utilization and improves the overall user experience by ensuring that each request is handled by the most suitable server. Moreover, if any of the backend servers fail, the health probe mechanism will detect the failure and reroute traffic to healthy servers, maintaining high availability.
Another practical example involves a financial services provider that handles sensitive customer information and processes online payments. In this case, the use of end-to-end SSL encryption is essential to meet compliance requirements. The organization configures its Application Gateway to perform SSL termination at the gateway and re-encrypt the data before sending it to backend servers. This ensures data confidentiality and integrity while still benefiting from reduced SSL processing on backend servers.
Furthermore, the Web Application Firewall is configured with custom rules to block malicious traffic and prevent known attack vectors. This centralized security model simplifies policy management and reduces the attack surface.
In yet another scenario, a multinational e-commerce platform hosts multiple regional websites under the same domain. With Azure Application Gateway’s multiple site hosting feature, a single gateway instance can be used to serve all regional websites. Based on the host header in the incoming request, the Application Gateway can direct traffic to the appropriate backend pool. This reduces infrastructure costs and simplifies the deployment architecture.
Autoscaling is particularly beneficial for applications that experience unpredictable or seasonal traffic patterns. For example, during a major online sale event, traffic to an e-commerce site may spike dramatically. Azure Application Gateway automatically scales out to handle the increased load, ensuring that users do not experience latency or downtime. Once the traffic normalizes, the gateway scales back in, reducing unnecessary resource consumption and associated costs.
These examples highlight the flexibility and capability of Azure Application Gateway to address diverse business needs across different industries. Its ability to integrate seamlessly with other Azure services further enhances its utility and makes it a key component of modern application delivery strategies.
Key Features of Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway provides a rich set of features that make it suitable for enterprise-grade web application delivery. These features are designed to enhance performance, increase availability, and ensure secure handling of traffic in diverse environments. Understanding each feature in detail helps organizations make informed decisions about their deployment strategies.
Layer 7 Load Balancing
Azure Application Gateway performs load balancing at the application layer (Layer 7 of the OSI model). This means that routing decisions are made based on HTTP attributes such as the URI path, host headers, query strings, and even request methods. Unlike traditional load balancers, this allows for more intelligent and fine-grained control over how web traffic is distributed across backend resources.
This capability is particularly useful for hosting multiple web applications or APIs behind a single gateway. Based on the rules configured, different paths or domains can be routed to different backend pools without requiring separate load balancers or IP addresses.
SSL Termination and End-to-End SSL
SSL termination is the process by which the Application Gateway decrypts incoming HTTPS traffic at the gateway level. This significantly reduces the computational overhead on backend servers, which can now receive unencrypted HTTP traffic and focus on serving application logic rather than handling encryption.
For scenarios where enhanced security is required, Azure Application Gateway also supports end-to-end SSL. In this configuration, the traffic remains encrypted from the client to the backend server. The Application Gateway decrypts and inspects the traffic, and then re-encrypts it before forwarding it to the backend. This ensures confidentiality and data integrity while still allowing the gateway to perform its routing and security functions.
Web Application Firewall Integration
One of the most critical features of Azure Application Gateway is its integration with the Web Application Firewall (WAF). WAF provides centralized protection against common vulnerabilities and attacks, including those outlined in the OWASP Top 10 list. These include SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and request forgery attacks.
The WAF can operate in two modes: detection and prevention. In detection mode, malicious requests are logged but still allowed through. In prevention mode, such requests are actively blocked before reaching the backend servers. WAF policies can be customized to include exclusions, rate limits, and geo-based restrictions, giving administrators full control over security rules.
This built-in firewall helps organizations comply with regulatory requirements and enhances the security posture of web-facing applications without requiring separate security appliances.
Autoscaling
Azure Application Gateway supports autoscaling, which enables the gateway to automatically adjust the number of instances in response to changes in web traffic. This is essential for applications that experience fluctuating demand, such as retail sites during promotional events or social platforms with user-generated traffic spikes.
With autoscaling, resource utilization is optimized, leading to better cost-efficiency and performance. Scaling operations are handled by Azure internally, eliminating the need for manual intervention or third-party orchestration tools.
URL-Based Routing
URL-based routing allows administrators to direct requests to different backend pools based on the structure of the requested URL. This is particularly useful in microservices architectures where different services are exposed through different path segments.
For example, requests for /api/orders can be routed to a backend pool containing order-processing microservices, while /api/users can be routed to a separate user-management pool. This improves scalability, reduces interdependencies, and allows independent scaling and deployment of services.
Session Affinity (Cookie-Based)
Azure Application Gateway supports session affinity, also known as “sticky sessions,” using a feature called “cookie-based affinity.” This ensures that all requests from a particular client session are routed to the same backend server. This is important for applications that maintain session-specific state data on the server side.
The Application Gateway accomplishes this by injecting a special cookie into client responses. Subsequent requests from the same client will contain this cookie, allowing the gateway to route traffic consistently to the original server.
Multi-Site Hosting
Application Gateway enables hosting of multiple websites using a single gateway instance. This is achieved through host-based routing, which uses the host header of the incoming HTTP request to determine which backend pool should serve the request.
This feature reduces infrastructure complexity and cost, especially for organizations managing multiple domains or subdomains. It is commonly used in content management platforms, digital agencies, and SaaS solutions that provide services to multiple customers under different domain names.
Custom Health Probes
To ensure high availability and reliability, Azure Application Gateway uses health probes to monitor the status of backend servers. By default, the gateway checks HTTP response codes to determine whether a backend is healthy. However, administrators can define custom probes that test specific endpoints using HTTP or HTTPS and include additional parameters like expected response codes, timeout intervals, and probe intervals.
Custom probes help in detecting partial failures and improve failover accuracy by ensuring that only healthy endpoints receive traffic.
Configuration and Deployment Considerations
When planning and deploying Azure Application Gateway, several configuration elements must be considered to ensure optimal performance, cost-efficiency, and security. These include choosing the appropriate tier, setting up network integration, and defining routing and security rules.
Choosing the Right Tier
Azure Application Gateway is offered in three primary tiers: Standard, Standard v2, and WAF v2. Each tier has different capabilities and pricing models. While the Standard tier provides basic load balancing features, the v2 tiers include enhancements such as autoscaling, zone redundancy, and faster provisioning times.
Organizations requiring advanced features like WAF protection and autoscaling should choose the WAF v2 tier, which is optimized for production workloads and mission-critical applications.
Network Integration
Application Gateway is deployed into a virtual network (VNet) and can be configured to serve both internal and external clients. For external-facing applications, a public frontend IP address is assigned. For internal applications, a private frontend IP can be used to restrict access within the network.
Integration with Azure Private Link, ExpressRoute, and Network Security Groups (NSGs) allows for more secure and granular control of network traffic.
Security Best Practices
For enhanced security, it is recommended to:
- Use HTTPS for all incoming and backend communication.
- Regularly update SSL certificates and use strong cipher suites.
- Enable WAF in prevention mode for production workloads.
- Restrict access using NSGs or Azure Firewall rules.
- Monitor gateway metrics and diagnostic logs for anomalies.
Cost Management
Costs associated with Azure Application Gateway depend on the tier, number of instances, data processing, and additional features such as WAF. To manage costs effectively, autoscaling should be configured to match actual traffic demands. Diagnostic settings should be reviewed regularly to ensure that logging and metric collection are optimized for both insight and efficiency.
Benefits of Using Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway offers a range of benefits that make it an ideal choice for web application delivery in the cloud. These benefits span across performance, security, scalability, and ease of management.
Enhanced Security
With features like SSL termination, WAF integration, and custom routing rules, Azure Application Gateway ensures that web applications are protected from common threats and data breaches. Centralized management of SSL certificates and security policies simplifies compliance with regulatory standards.
Improved Application Performance
Layer 7 routing, session affinity, and autoscaling capabilities lead to faster response times and consistent performance under varying load conditions. The ability to offload SSL decryption to the gateway reduces the processing burden on backend servers.
Simplified Infrastructure
Hosting multiple applications and services behind a single gateway instance streamlines infrastructure management. Built-in monitoring tools, integration with Azure Monitor, and diagnostic logging provide deep visibility into traffic patterns and system performance.
High Availability and Resilience
Application Gateway is designed for high availability, with built-in support for Azure Availability Zones and autoscaling. Health probes ensure that only healthy instances serve requests, reducing the risk of application downtime.
Cost Efficiency
By consolidating traffic routing, security, and load balancing into a single service, Azure Application Gateway eliminates the need for multiple point solutions. Autoscaling and pay-as-you-go pricing help optimize cloud spending based on actual usage.
Challenges and Limitations
Despite its many advantages, Azure Application Gateway also has certain limitations and challenges that should be considered before deployment.
Complexity of Configuration
The initial setup of Application Gateway can be complex, particularly for organizations unfamiliar with Azure networking and security concepts. Proper planning is required to configure listeners, rules, and health probes effectively.
Limited Support for Certain Protocols
As a Layer 7 load balancer, Application Gateway is designed primarily for HTTP and HTTPS traffic. It does not support protocols such as FTP or SMTP. Organizations requiring multi-protocol support may need to deploy Azure Load Balancer or other services alongside Application Gateway.
Potential Latency Overhead
Because the Application Gateway performs SSL termination, deep packet inspection, and routing at the application layer, it may introduce slight latency compared to simpler Layer 4 load balancers. However, this trade-off is generally offset by the benefits of enhanced routing and security.
Certificate Management
While SSL termination simplifies backend operations, managing SSL certificates at the gateway level introduces an additional administrative burden. Organizations must establish processes for regularly renewing and deploying certificates to avoid service disruption.
Monitoring and Diagnostics
Effective monitoring is crucial to maintaining the performance, availability, and security of any application delivery infrastructure. Azure Application Gateway provides multiple tools and integrations to help administrators monitor traffic, diagnose issues, and respond to events in a timely manner.
Integration with Azure Monitor
Azure Application Gateway is natively integrated with Azure Monitor, allowing administrators to collect metrics, set up alerts, and view logs in a unified dashboard. Azure Monitor captures key performance indicators such as throughput, latency, number of requests, failed requests, and healthy/unhealthy backend instances.
By configuring custom alerts, teams can proactively address performance bottlenecks or service interruptions. For example, an alert can be triggered if the number of failed requests exceeds a defined threshold, indicating a potential issue with backend services or application logic.
Diagnostic Logs
Azure Application Gateway generates diagnostic logs that can be used to analyze traffic patterns, detect security threats, and troubleshoot configuration errors. These logs are categorized into three main types:
- Access Logs: Record details about each client request, including source IP, requested URL, HTTP method, and response code.
- Performance Logs: Provide data on throughput, latency, and resource usage, which help in performance tuning.
- Firewall Logs (if WAF is enabled): Capture details about traffic that matches WAF rules, including the rule ID, matched pattern, and action taken (e.g., blocked or allowed).
Diagnostic logs can be exported to Azure Log Analytics, Storage Accounts, or Event Hubs for further processing or archival. Log Analytics provides advanced query capabilities using Kusto Query Language (KQL), allowing teams to create custom dashboards and reports for in-depth analysis.
Connection Monitoring and Traffic Analytics
Connection monitoring tools such as Network Watcher can be used to trace and diagnose connection issues between the Application Gateway and backend pools. Traffic Analytics provides insight into user behavior, geo-distribution of traffic, and usage patterns, which can inform decisions about scaling, optimization, and regional deployments.
Common Architectural Patterns
Azure Application Gateway is a versatile component that fits into various cloud-native architectures. Several architectural patterns are commonly used to deploy web applications with high performance, scalability, and security.
Front-End with Web Application Firewall
In this pattern, Azure Application Gateway is deployed in front of a web application and configured with the Web Application Firewall. It acts as the first line of defense, inspecting incoming traffic and blocking malicious requests before they reach the backend.
This architecture is suitable for public-facing websites, e-commerce platforms, and customer portals that are exposed to the internet and must comply with industry regulations such as PCI DSS or HIPAA.
Application Gateway with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
For containerized applications running in Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Application Gateway can serve as an ingress controller using the Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC). This allows HTTP routing to be managed natively within Kubernetes, enabling DevOps teams to define routing rules using standard Kubernetes manifests.
This pattern is ideal for microservices-based applications, providing autoscaling, path-based routing, and secure TLS termination while maintaining compliance with Kubernetes-native workflows.
Multi-Region Deployment with Traffic Manager
To achieve global resiliency and low-latency user experiences, Azure Application Gateway can be deployed in multiple Azure regions in conjunction with Azure Traffic Manager. Traffic Manager uses DNS-based routing to direct users to the nearest Application Gateway instance based on performance, geographic location, or availability.
This architecture ensures business continuity in the event of a regional outage and improves response times for users worldwide.
Internal Application Gateway for Microservices
In scenarios where security and network segmentation are critical, Azure Application Gateway can be deployed with a private frontend IP and used for internal traffic management. This pattern is suitable for enterprises that need to route traffic between internal microservices, databases, and APIs without exposing them to the public internet.
By combining Application Gateway with Azure Private Link and Network Security Groups, organizations can enforce strict access controls and maintain isolation between services.
Best Practices for Deployment and Management
To maximize the benefits of Azure Application Gateway and ensure operational reliability, certain best practices should be followed during design, deployment, and ongoing management.
Plan for High Availability
Deploy Application Gateway in at least two availability zones to ensure redundancy and fault tolerance. Use backend services that are also highly available, such as virtual machine scale sets, availability sets, or Azure App Service.
Ensure that health probes are correctly configured to detect failures and remove unhealthy instances from the pool. This minimizes downtime and improves user experience.
Use HTTPS and Strong Encryption
Always use HTTPS for incoming traffic and, where possible, for backend communication. Choose strong SSL/TLS protocols and cipher suites, and avoid deprecated versions such as SSL 3.0 or TLS 1.0.
Manage SSL certificates securely using Azure Key Vault and automate certificate renewal to avoid unexpected expirations.
Enable and Tune WAF
When enabling the Web Application Firewall, start with detection mode to monitor traffic and fine-tune rules. Once confident in the ruleset, switch to prevention mode to actively block malicious traffic.
Regularly update the WAF rules and maintain custom rules for application-specific logic. Use exclusion rules carefully to avoid creating blind spots in security coverage.
Leverage Autoscaling and Cost Controls
Enable autoscaling to handle traffic spikes without manual intervention. Set appropriate scaling thresholds based on historical usage data and performance metrics.
Monitor cost using Azure Cost Management and consider using reserved capacity or budget alerts to avoid unexpected charges.
Monitor and Audit Continuously
Set up alerts for critical metrics such as high latency, increased error rates, or WAF rule matches. Review access and performance logs regularly to identify patterns and anomalies.
Enable activity logs and integrate them with Azure Sentinel or third-party SIEM tools for continuous auditing and threat detection.
Real-World Use Cases
Azure Application Gateway supports a wide range of real-world scenarios, from small-scale web apps to enterprise-grade architectures. The following examples demonstrate its versatility across industries and use cases.
E-Commerce Websites
E-commerce platforms often experience variable traffic loads, particularly during sales events or holiday seasons. Azure Application Gateway enables these sites to handle high user volumes through autoscaling, while maintaining security with Web Application Firewall (WAF).
URL-based routing can direct users to product pages, checkout systems, and order tracking services hosted across different backend pools. Session affinity ensures that users maintain a consistent experience, especially during multi-step checkouts.
SaaS Platforms with Multi-Tenant Architecture
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers often host multiple client applications under different domains or subdomains. Application Gateway’s multi-site hosting and host-based routing capabilities allow these organizations to deliver tenant-specific content while maintaining a single gateway instance.
Additionally, WAF rules can be tailored to enforce tenant-specific security policies, and diagnostic logs help isolate issues at the tenant level.
Secure Government or Financial Services Portals
Government agencies and financial institutions prioritize data privacy and regulatory compliance. Application Gateway can be deployed in private mode with end-to-end SSL encryption, internal frontend IPs, and integration with Azure Private Link.
Custom WAF policies and advanced logging allow these organizations to meet compliance requirements (such as FIPS, GDPR, or PCI DSS) while offering scalable and highly available services to internal or external users.
API Gateway for Microservices
For organizations adopting microservices architecture, Application Gateway can serve as a centralized API gateway. By routing requests based on paths or headers, it enables seamless communication between services.
This use case often leverages Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and the Application Gateway Ingress Controller (AGIC), which integrates Kubernetes-native configurations with Application Gateway’s powerful Layer 7 routing capabilities.
Comparison with Similar Azure Services
While Azure Application Gateway is a robust solution, Azure offers other services that may be suitable depending on the specific needs of the workload. Below is a comparison of Application Gateway with other related services.
Key Insight: Use Azure Load Balancer when you need ultra-fast, protocol-level routing (e.g., for backend databases or custom TCP applications). Use Application Gateway for intelligent Key Insight: Azure Front Door is ideal for global applications needing CDN, TLS offload at the edge, and traffic acceleration. Application Gateway is better for regional traffic, private access, and VNet-integrated apps.
Key Insight: Use API Management when managing a public or internal API catalog with advanced policy control, developer onboarding, and analytics. Use Application Gateway for traffic routing, load balancing, and WAF enforcement.
Migration Strategies
Transitioning from legacy load balancers or other Azure services to Application Gateway requires careful planning and execution. Below are some recommended strategies for a smooth migration.
Assessment and Planning
- Inventory: Identify all applications, domains, and endpoints currently served by your existing load balancer.
- Requirements: Define routing needs (path-based, host-based), security policies, SSL requirements, and performance metrics.
- Mapping: Map existing routes and SSL certificates to Application Gateway listeners and backend pools.
Incremental Migration
- Pilot Deployment: Start with a non-critical application to test routing rules, health probes, and WAF policies.
- Canary Testing: Route a small percentage of traffic to the Application Gateway instance using Azure Traffic Manager or DNS-weighted routing.
- Cutover: Gradually increase traffic and monitor performance, availability, and logs before making Application Gateway the primary path.
Validation and Optimization
- Monitor logs, metrics, and alerts to identify potential misconfigurations or performance issues.
- Use Log Analytics and Network Watcher to validate end-to-end connectivity.
- Regularly tune WAF rules, update SSL certificates, and adjust autoscaling settings based on traffic patterns.
Azure Application Gateway is a foundational component in designing secure, scalable, and performance-optimized cloud architectures. Its rich feature set—comprising Layer 7 load balancing, WAF, autoscaling, and SSL termination—makes it a preferred choice for a wide range of scenarios.
When to Use Azure Application Gateway
- You require advanced traffic routing based on paths, headers, or hostnames.
- You need centralized WAF protection for web applications.
- Your applications are hosted in a virtual network (VNet) and need private access.
- You plan to use Kubernetes (AKS) with native ingress integration (AGIC).
When to Consider Alternatives
- You need ultra-low latency TCP/UDP load balancing (use Azure Load Balancer).
- You are delivering content globally and need CDN with acceleration (use Azure Front Door).
- You are managing an API product with subscriptions and analytics (use Azure API Management
Summary and Final Thoughts
Azure Application Gateway is a powerful and flexible service designed for modern application delivery in the cloud. It combines Layer 7 load balancing, SSL termination, Web Application Firewall protection, and intelligent routing into a single, scalable platform. By supporting features like autoscaling, multi-site hosting, and deep diagnostics, it enables organizations to build secure, resilient, and high-performance web applications.
Its native integration with other Azure services such as Azure Monitor, Log Analytics, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Traffic Manager enhances its utility across a wide range of scenarios. From public-facing web portals to secure internal microservice architectures, Azure Application Gateway provides the tools necessary to manage, secure, and optimize web traffic at scale.
By adhering to best practices in security, performance tuning, and cost optimization, organizations can maximize their return on investment and deliver seamless digital experiences to users. Whether part of a cloud-native application or a hybrid architecture, Azure Application Gateway stands as a foundational component in the enterprise journey toward secure and scalable cloud adoption.