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Quickstart: Create a Front Door for a highly available global web application using Azure CLI

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Important

Azure Front Door (classic) will be retired on March 31, 2027. To avoid any service disruption, it is important that you migrate your Azure Front Door (classic) profiles to Azure Front Door Standard or Premium tier by March 2027. For more information, see Azure Front Door (classic) retirement.

Important

Azure Front Door (classic) will be retired on March 31, 2027. To avoid any service disruption, it is important that you migrate your Azure Front Door (classic) profiles to Azure Front Door Standard or Premium tier by March 2027. For more information, see Azure Front Door (classic) retirement.

Get started with Azure Front Door by using Azure CLI to create a highly available and high-performance global web application.

The Front Door directs web traffic to specific resources in a backend pool. You defined the frontend domain, add resources to a backend pool, and create a routing rule. This article uses a simple configuration of one backend pool with a web app resource and a single routing rule using default path matching "/*".

Diagram of Front Door deployment environment using the Azure CLI.

Prerequisites

  • An Azure account with an active subscription. Create an account for free.
  • Azure CLI installed locally or Azure Cloud Shell
  • Ensure that the front-door extension is added to your Azure CLI
az extension add --name front-door

Azure Cloud Shell

Azure hosts Azure Cloud Shell, an interactive shell environment that you can use through your browser. You can use either Bash or PowerShell with Cloud Shell to work with Azure services. You can use the Cloud Shell preinstalled commands to run the code in this article, without having to install anything on your local environment.

To start Azure Cloud Shell:

Option Example/Link
Select Try It in the upper-right corner of a code or command block. Selecting Try It doesn't automatically copy the code or command to Cloud Shell. Screenshot that shows an example of Try It for Azure Cloud Shell.
Go to https://shell.azure.com, or select the Launch Cloud Shell button to open Cloud Shell in your browser. Button to launch Azure Cloud Shell.
Select the Cloud Shell button on the menu bar at the upper right in the Azure portal. Screenshot that shows the Cloud Shell button in the Azure portal

To use Azure Cloud Shell:

  1. Start Cloud Shell.

  2. Select the Copy button on a code block (or command block) to copy the code or command.

  3. Paste the code or command into the Cloud Shell session by selecting Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux, or by selecting Cmd+Shift+V on macOS.

  4. Select Enter to run the code or command.

If you choose to install and use the CLI locally, this quickstart requires Azure CLI version 2.0.28 or later. To find the version, run az --version. If you need to install or upgrade, see Install the Azure CLI.

Create a resource group

In Azure, you allocate related resources to a resource group. You can either use an existing resource group or create a new one.

For this quickstart, you need a resource group in Central US.

Create a resource group with az group create:

az group create \
    --name myRGFDCentral \
    --location centralus

Create two instances of a web app

Two instances of a web application that run in different Azure regions is required for this quickstart. Both the web application instances run in Active/Active mode, so either one can service traffic.

If you don't already have a web app, use the following script to set up two example web apps.

Create app service plans

Before you can create the web app you will need an app service plan in Central US.

Create app service plans with az appservice plan create:

az appservice plan create \
--name myAppServicePlanCentralUS \
--resource-group myRGFDCentral

Create web apps

Running the following commands will create a web app in the app service plans in the previous step. Web app names have to be globally unique.

Create web app with az webapp create:

az webapp create \
--name WebAppContoso-1 \
--resource-group myRGFDCentral \
--plan myAppServicePlanCentralUS

Make note of the default host name of the web app so you can define the backend addresses when you deploy the Front Door in the next step.

Create the Front Door

Create a basic Front Door with default load balancing settings, health probe, and routing rules by running to follow:

Create Front Door with az network front-door create:

az network front-door create \
--resource-group myRGFDCentral \
--name contoso-frontend \
--accepted-protocols Http Https \
--backend-address webappcontoso-1.azurewebsites.net

--resource-group: Specify a resource group where you want to deploy the Front Door.

--name: Specify a globally unique name for your Azure Front Door.

--accepted-protocols: Accepted values are Http and Https. If you want to use both, specific both separated by a space.

--backend-address: Define the web app host name.

Once the deployment has successfully completed, make note of the host name in the frontEndpoints section.

Test the Front Door

Open a web browser and enter the hostname obtain from the commands. The Front Door will direct your request to one of the backend resources.

Front Door testing page

Clean up resources

When you no longer need the resources that you created with the Front Door, delete both resource groups. When you delete the resource group, you also delete the Front Door and all its related resources.

To delete the resource group use az group delete:

az group delete \
--name myRGFDCentral

Next steps

In this quickstart, you created a:

  • Front Door
  • A web app

To learn how to add a custom domain to your Front Door, continue to the Front Door tutorials.

Add a custom domain