There is a big buzz out there about Azure Front Door.  Is it a Load Balancer? A CDN? A Traffic Manager? A Web Application Firewall ? A Reverse Proxy? An Application Gateway?

So, what is Azure Front Door?

Azure Front Door actually is all the above and more. It is a global service, that routes web traffic based on performance and availability. A Layer 7 multi-region load balancer with Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities, DDoS protection & CDN.

Azure Front Door is the entry point, the edge, of all Microsoft’s WAN. All Microsoft services, like Office 365 & Bing, are using Azure Front Door.

The services that Azure Front door provides are:

• Accelerate application performance
• Increase application availability with smart health probes
• URL-based routing
• Multi-site hosting
• URL redirection
• Session affinity
• SSL termination
• Custom Domain & certificate management
• Security via custom WAF rules
• DDoS protection
• URL rewrite
• IPv6 and HTTP/2 support

At Azure Front Door documentation there is a paragraph that can help to understand the difference between Azure Front Door and other publishing / load balancing Azure solutions and where to use each.

Azure provides a suite of fully managed load-balancing solutions for your scenarios. If you are looking for a DNS based global routing and do not have requirements for Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol termination (“SSL offload”) or per-HTTP/HTTPS request, application-layer processing, review Traffic Manager. If you are looking for load balancing between your servers in a region, for application layer, review Application Gateway and for network layer load balancing, review Load Balancer. Your end-to-end scenarios might benefit from combining these solutions as needed.

For pricing information, see Front Door Pricing.

How to scale your web apps with Front Door

Create two simple Azure Web apps. Check this guide for a simple guide on how to create Azure App Service: https://www.e-apostolidis.gr/microsoft/azure/azure-start-point-your-first-web-app/

One at West Europe:

and one at North Europe:

Using FTP, I deployed an one-page html site at both regions. I change the text of both site to say “This Web Site is located at North Europe Azure Datacenter”

and “West Europe” to the other.

Then create a Front Door. Search for Front Door at Azure marketplace and Create one.

This is a high level diagram of the Front Door with two Web Apps design that we will create

The “create a Front Door” wizard will start and we can configure it step by step. First we will create a Frontend host by clicking the + at the Step 1

At the frontend host we will create the URL that our apps will be available. I added the papostolidis.azurefd.net. of course later you can add your custom domain and add a CNAME to route the traffic to the Front Door.

Then, at the Backend pools (Step 2), press the + to add the web apps. add a name for the backend pool, like “myapps” and press + ADD a backend to add the apps.

Select host type, you can add app service, cloud service, storage and custom host (URL). I selected the app service.

Select the subscription and the app service and add the correct ports for http and https traffic.

The priority defines if the traffic will be routed to the host with the lower priority number (e.g. 1) and if that host fails will route to the next host with bigger priority number (e.g. 2). If you add the same priority to more than one host then it will follow the weight number.

The weight number defines the percentage of requests that will be routed to each host.

The same way add the second web app

Finally select a path, protocol and interval for the probe that will do health checks to the app to define if it is active or not.

The third step is to add the routing rules. At the routing rules you can specify:

• The accepted protocol, http or https.
• the frontend host for this rule
• the patterns that the route will accept, like www.e-apostolidis.gr/mysite/* or just /* ro root.
• Route type forward or redirect.
• The backend pool that this rule will direct the traffic
• The protocol that the traffic will be forwarded. Here we define the SSL Offload if we select HTTPs for frontend accepted protocol and HTTP for backend.
• URL Rewrite rules
• Caching, for static content caching like CDN.

Once all steps are completed we can move on and create the Front Door

When the Front Door is ready, we can see the URL at the Overview.

And browse our web app using the Front Door URL:

How to protect your web apps with Front Door

Right now we scaled our web apps. If we use each app’s URL we can still access the app. The first security step is to lock the web apps to be accessed only through the Front Door URL.

Checking the Azure Front Door FAQ page, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/frontdoor/front-door-faq it lists the Front Door’s address rance.

Front Door’s IPv4 backend IP space: 147.243.0.0/16

Go to the App Service, at the Networking section, select “Configure Access Restrictions”

Add an allow access restriction with the IP range of the Front Door.

Automatically a Deny rule will be created for everything else.

Add the rule to both web apps and then try to access the apps with their direct links.

Now on, we can access the apps only by using the Front Door URL:

This is a high level diagram after the restrictions

At the next article, we will see how to add Web Application Firewall (WAF) Rules to Front Door, Stay Tuned!! 

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Securely scale your Web Apps with Azure Front Door appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

In this post series we will go through some basic steps on how to start with Microsoft Azure. For start we will create a Web App.

If you don’t have an Azure Subscription, you can easily create a free trial by just going to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/

Let’s create our first Web App. Go to the Azure Portal by navigating to https://portal.azure.com and click “+ Create a resource”

At the search box write “Web App” and press enter

At the search results. click the “Web App” and at the next screen just press “Create”

The “Web App Create” wizard will open.

Enter a name for the App. This will be the Public name of your App. Azure by default provides the domain *.azurewebsites.net for free. So in my example the prowebdev.azurewebsites.net will be the URL of my App Select the Azure Subscription that will used to bill the Web App and a Resource Group. The Resource Group is used to organize the resources and provide role based access control among other. OS: Select the Operating System platform that will host your Web App. This can be Windows, Linux or a Docker Container. For the test I will select Windows.

As you can see the wizard has selected an App Service Plan by default with a random name and location. The App Service Plan is actually the Web Server that will host out Web App. Click on the “App Service Plan/Location”

Add a name for the Web Server, select the Location that is nearest to you (or your clients) and the Pricing Tier.

By pressing OK you will return to the Web App create wizard and press Create. Now you can monitor the creating process of the App form the “Notifications” option at the top right of the portal, it is the button that has a ringing bell image. First you will see the “Deployment in progress…” message and as soon as the App is ready you will see the “Deployment completed” message.

Now if you go to the Resource group you will see two resources. The App Service and the App Service Plan. In high level, the App Service Plan is the web server and the App Service is the Web Application.

Now click the App Service and at its blade you can see your applications URL.

Click the URL and you will see the Demo page

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure Start Point | Your first Web App appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

There are many scenarios where we want to have the Web Application on the Cloud but on the other hand, due to various limitations, the database stays on-premises. Azure has a service, called Azure Hybrid Connections, that allows the Web App to connect to on-premises databases, using internal IP address or the database server host name, without a complex VPN setup.

The Connection diagram

I have tested the connection with Microsoft SQL, PostgreSQL, MySQL, mongodb and Oracle.  The databse requirements is to have a static port. So the first step in case of a Microsoft SQL instance is to assign a static port. In my test environment I have a Microsoft SQL 2016 and I assigned the default port 1433, using the Sql Server Configuration Manager / SQL Server Network Configuration / Protocols for INSTANCENAME (MSSQLSERVER)

All paid service plans supports hybrid connections. The limits are on how many hybrid connections can be used per plan, as the below table shows.

To start creating the Hybrid Connections, go to the App Service / Networking / Hybrid Connections and press the “Configure your hybrid connection endpoints”

At the Hybrid connections blade there are two steps, the first is to “Add hybrid connection” and the second is to “Download the connection manager”.

First click the “Add hybrid connection” and then press “Create new hybrid connection”

The “Create new hybrid connection” blade will open. Add a Hybrid connection name, this must be at least 6 characters and it is the display name of the connection. At the Endpoint host add the hostname of the database server and at the Endpoint port, the port of the database. At my case I added 1433, as this is the port I assign to my SQL instance before.

Finally you will need to specify a name for a Servicebus namespace. As you realize, the hybrid connection uses Azure Servicebus for the communication, and press OK.

Once the connection is created it will be shown at the portal as “Not connected”

Now we need to download and install the hybrid connection manager by clicking the “Download connection manager”. For this test I will install the hybrid connection manager at the same server as the SQL database, but for a production environment it is recommended to install the hybrid connection manager to a different server that will have access to the database servers only to the required ports. For the best security install it to a DMZ server and open only the required ports to the database servers.

Run the downloaded msi and just click Install.

Open the “Hybrid connection manager” UI and press “Add a new Hybrid Connection.

Sign in to your Azure account

Once logged in, choose your Subscription and the hybrid connection configured previously will appear. Select it and press Save.

Now at the connection manager status it will show “Connected”

The same at the Azure Portal and your Hybrid connection is ready.

Test, test, test and proof of concept. Open the Console, form the Web App Blade, and tcpping the SQL server’s hostname at the port 1433

and also sqlcmd

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure App Service, get data from on-premises databases securely appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.