Azure Traffic Manager ​

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.

Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct the client requests to the appropriate service endpoint based on a traffic-routing method. Traffic manager also provides health monitoring for every endpoint.

The endpoint can be any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure. Traffic Manager provides a range of traffic-routing methods and endpoint monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover models. Traffic Manager is resilient to failure, including the failure of an entire Azure region.

Key features of Traffic Manager ​

Increase application availability

• Traffic Manager delivers high availability for your critical applications by monitoring your endpoints and providing automatic failover when an endpoint goes down.

Improve application performance

• Azure allows you to run cloud services and websites in datacenters located around the world.
• Traffic Manager can improve the responsiveness of your website by directing traffic to the endpoint with the lowest latency.

Service maintenance without downtime

• You can have planned maintenance done on your applications without downtime.
• Traffic Manager can direct traffic to alternative endpoints while the maintenance is in progress.

Combine hybrid applications

• Traffic Manager supports external, non-Azure endpoints enabling it to be used with hybrid cloud and on-premises deployments, including the burst-to-cloud, migrate-to-cloud, and failover-to-cloud scenarios.

Distribute traffic for complex deployments

• Using nested Traffic Manager profiles, multiple traffic-routing methods can be combined to create sophisticated and flexible rules to scale to the needs of larger, more complex deployments.

How Traffic Manager works ​

Azure Traffic Manager enables you to control the distribution of traffic across your application endpoints. An endpoint is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure.

Traffic Manager provides two key benefits:

• Distribution of traffic according to one of several traffic-routing methods
• Continuous monitoring of endpoint health and automatic failover when endpoints fail

When a client attempts to connect to a service, it must first resolve the DNS name of the service to an IP address. The client then connects to that IP address to access the service.

Traffic Manager uses DNS to direct clients to specific service endpoints based on the rules of the traffic-routing method. Clients connect to the selected endpoint directly. Traffic Manager is not a proxy or a gateway. Traffic Manager does not see the traffic passing between the client and the service.

Traffic Manager works at the DNS level which is at the Application layer (Layer-7).