Like the application gateway or the load balancer, the Traffic Manager is a mechanism to distribute incoming traffic among different Azure data centers. Unlike the load balancing of the other Azure balancers, the Traffic Manager works based on distribution via DNS entries, which means you deploy an DNS Name for the traffic manager. The clients connect directly to the endpoint for the application which has the best response time for his location. Traffic manager is mostly used as a frontend for content delivery networks or applications distributed over different Azure regions. The following table summarizes the differences between all three load balancers:
|
Service |
Azure load balancer |
Application gateway |
Traffic Manager |
|
Technology |
Transport level (OSI layer 4) |
Application level (OSI layer 7) |
DNS level |
|
Application protocols supported |
Any |
HTTP and HTTPS |
Any (An HTTP/S endpoint is required for endpoint monitoring) |
|
Endpoints |
Azure... |