What is Azure Front Door Standard/Premium (Preview)?
Important
This documentation is for Azure Front Door Standard/Premium (Preview). Looking for information on Azure Front Door? View Azure Front Door Docs.
Azure Front Door Standard/Premium is a fast, reliable, and secure modern cloud CDN that uses the Microsoft global edge network and integrates with intelligent threat protection. It combines the capabilities of Azure Front Door, Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) standard, and Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) into a single secure cloud CDN platform.
With Azure Front Door Standard/Premium, you can transform your global consumer and enterprise applications into secure and high-performing personalized modern applications with contents that reach a global audience at the network edge close to the user. It also enables your application to scale out without warm-up while benefitting from the global HTTP load balancing with instant failover.
Azure Front Door Standard/Premium works at Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS layer) using anycast protocol with split TCP and Microsoft's global network to improve global connectivity. Based on your customized routing method using rules set, you can ensure that Azure Front Door will route your client requests to the fastest and most available origin. An application origin is any Internet-facing service hosted inside or outside of Azure. Azure Front Door Standard/Premium provides a range of traffic-routing methods and origin health monitoring options to suit different application needs and automatic failover scenarios. Similar to Traffic Manager, Front Door is resilient to failures, including failures to an entire Azure region.
Azure Front Door also protects your app at the edges with integrated Web Application Firewall protection, Bot Protection, and built-in layer 3/layer 4 distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection. It also secures your private back-ends with private link service. Azure Front Door gives you Microsoft’s best-in-practice security at global scale.
Note
Azure provides a suite of fully managed load-balancing solutions for your scenarios.
- If you are looking to do DNS based global routing and do not have requirements for Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol termination ("SSL offload"), per-HTTP/HTTPS request or application-layer processing, review Traffic Manager.
- If you want to load balance between your servers in a region at the application layer, review Application Gateway
- To do network layer load balancing, review Load Balancer.
Your end-to-end scenarios may benefit from combining these solutions as needed. For an Azure load-balancing options comparison, see Overview of load-balancing options in Azure.
Important
Azure Front Door Standard/Premium is currently in public preview. This preview version is provided without a service level agreement, and it's not recommended for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities. For more information, see Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.
Why use Azure Front Door Standard/Premium (Preview)?
Azure Front Door Standard/Premium provides a single unified platform which caters to both dynamic and static acceleration with built in turnkey security integration, and a simple and predictable pricing model. Front Door also enables you to define, manage, and monitor the global routing for your app.
Key features included with Azure Front Door Standard/Premium (Preview):
Accelerated application performance by using split TCP-based anycast protocol.
Intelligent health probe monitoring and load balancing among origins.
Define your own custom domain with flexible domain validation.
Application security with integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF).
SSL offload and integrated certificate management.
Secure your origins with Private Link.
Customizable traffic routing and optimizations via Rule Set.
Built-in reports with all-in-one dashboard for both Front Door and security patterns.
Real-time monitoring and alerts that integrate with Azure Monitoring.
Logging for each Front Door request and failed health probes.
Native support of end-to-end IPv6 connectivity and HTTP/2 protocol.
Pricing
Azure Front Door Standard/Premium has two SKUs, Standard and Premium. See Tier Comparison. For pricing information, see Front Door Pricing.
What's new?
Subscribe to the RSS feed and view the latest Azure Front Door feature updates on the Azure Updates page.
Next steps
- Learn how to create a Front Door.