Why non HTTP traffic is recommended in Azure Traffic manager?

Question

Hi Team, First of all, thank you very much for providing a great learning platform and giving it for free to everyone. I have a very simple question. To my knowledge, DNS is used by web applications to look up respective IP address. The training material says that Azure Traffic manager is based on DNS. I wonder how will it support non HTTP traffic? I checked the page on Azure Traffic Manager in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/traffic-manager/traffic-manager-how-it-works, the example usage shown here is with HTTP traffic only. Best regards, Vijaiya Prathap

Answer 1

Hello @vijaiya prathap ,

Thanks for reaching Azure Q and A platform.

Thanks for bring these questions, as it would be useful for the community.

Please do go through the below mentioned points, which would give you an mere understanding of the concept of Traffic Manager.

1. Traffic Manager performs DNS based load balancing. As we know the concept and working of the Traffic Manager.
2. If you see the below image, you would get confused on why we have mentioned that Traffic Manager recommended traffic is non-http.

3. Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and responsiveness. Because Traffic Manager is a DNS-based load-balancing service, **it load balances only at the domain level. **
4. Please check the below image:

5. So, As explained in How Traffic Manager Works, Traffic Manager works at the DNS level. It uses DNS responses to direct clients to the appropriate service endpoint. Clients connect to the service endpoint directly, not through Traffic Manager. Therefore, Traffic Manager doesn't see the HTTP traffic between the client and the server.
6. To explain in the simple manner, if you have a Virtual Machine, which has a domain name to connect to the Virtual Machine on the remote access 3389. Then using Traffic Manager, it could give you the nearest VM endpoint via DNS based load balancing.

Please do let us know if you have more query on this ask.

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