Azure Load Balancer vs Traffic Manager

November 20, 2021

Azure Load Balancer vs Traffic Manager

Welcome to another episode of Flare Compare, where we compare different products and services to help you make informed decisions. Today we’ll compare Azure Load Balancer and Traffic Manager for cloud networking.

Azure Load Balancer

Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 load balancer that distributes incoming traffic among virtual machines (VMs) or services in the same virtual network. Load balancer supports inbound and outbound scenarios, provides low latency and high throughput, and is optimized for TCP and UDP protocols.

Azure Load Balancer offers two types of load balancing:

Basic Load Balancer - Provides load balancing between VMs in a single availability set or VMs in a single virtual network.
Standard Load Balancer - Offers more features like load balancing across multiple virtual networks, external load balancing, and supports virtual machine scale sets.

Azure Load Balancer is priced based on the number of rules created and the data processed.

Traffic Manager

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancing service that helps you distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and performance. Traffic Manager monitors the health of your services and automatically routes traffic to the optimal location.

Azure Traffic Manager is ideal for scenarios like multi-region/global app deployments, disaster recovery, and high-availability solutions. Traffic Manager offers three load-balancing methods:

Priority – Directs traffic to the primary service endpoint unless it fails. If the primary endpoint fails, it routes traffic to the secondary endpoint.
Weighted – Distributes traffic across multiple endpoints either equally or unequally, based on a weight assigned to each endpoint.
Performance – Routes traffic to the endpoint that offers the lowest latency from the end-user.

Azure Traffic Manager is priced based on the number of DNS queries served.

Which one should you use?

Now that you know what both Azure Load Balancer and Traffic Manager, you might be wondering which one you should use. The answer depends on your use case.

Use Azure Load Balancer in scenarios where:

You need to load balance traffic between virtual machines or services in the same virtual network
You require Layer 4 load balancing
You need to optimize for TCP and UDP protocols

Use Azure Traffic Manager in scenarios where:

You want to distribute traffic between endpoints in different geographic regions
You need high availability and disaster recovery
You want to optimize based on endpoint latency

Final Verdict

Both Azure Load Balancer and Traffic Manager are great cloud networking tools. In summary, Azure Load Balancer is a reliable Layer 4 load balancer that is optimized for TCP and UDP protocols, while Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancing service designed for multi-region/global app deployments.

Before you make your choice, it’s important to understand your needs and requirements. Now that you know what both tools have to offer and what they are best suited for, you can make an informed decision.

References

Azure Load Balancer Overview. Microsoft. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/load-balancer/load-balancer-overview
Azure Traffic Manager Overview. Microsoft. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/traffic-manager/traffic-manager-overview