Microsoft Azure Application Gateway pros and cons: tips and advice from real users 2024 (2024)

FAQs

What are the disadvantages of Azure Application Gateway? ›

One option is each application has its own application gateway (apps will be separated by vnets and subnets). Main benefit to this is we can scale gateways independently of each other. The main disadvantage is cost and more resources to manage.

Azure Application Gateway helps in SSL termination at the gateway level itself, allowing communication between backend instances. This feature removes the encryption and decryption overhead from the backend server, and that makes the entire process a little faster and also decreases the response time.

Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic (OSI layer 7) load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.

Application gateways are susceptible to IP spoofing. Application gateways are not good and understanding protocols such as telnet. Client software must be "smart" and know to contact the gateway. Each application to be managed needs its own gateway.

Disadvantages of Application-Level Gateways

The stricter the monitoring rules on the proxy server, the slower the data flow. Proxy firewalls also have major compatibility problems, as they can't support a wide variety of connection types and network protocols.

Application gateways also permit the use of simpler filtering rules. Instead of having to route application traffic to several different systems, it only need be routed to the application gateway; all other traffic can be rejected.

Firewall and Application Gateway in parallel

Azure WAF in Azure Application Gateway protects inbound traffic to the web workloads, and the Azure Firewall inspects inbound traffic for the other applications. The Azure Firewall will cover outbound flows from both workload types.

One of the critical features of Application Gateway is its ability to cache content, making your web applications more responsive and reducing the load on your web servers by serving content from the gateway's cache.

What is the difference between Azure Application Gateway and front door? ›

Azure Front Door and Azure Application Gateway are both load balancers for HTTP/HTTPS traffic, but they have different scopes. Front Door is a global service that can distribute requests across regions, while Application Gateway is a regional service that can balance requests within a region.

So, if you want 100% protection, If you are looking to protect an AppService or other resources from attacks, it is ideal to have that App Service/other resources placed behind an Application Gateway with WAF. Once you enable move the App Service behind and Application Gateway, enable WAF on the Application Gateway.

Azure Application gateway V2 has a maximum file upload limit of 4 GB for both Standard and WAF SKU (when you are using the new WAF engine with CRS 3.2 or newer). So, it doesn't matter if you are using WAF or not, the maximum limit for file upload remains at 4 GB as of today.

- Cons: - Limited control over deployment process. - Not ideal for complex applications or CI/CD workflows.

Front Door is a global service that can distribute requests across regions, while Application Gateway is a regional service that can balance requests within a region.