Application Gateway (AGW)

Application Gateway (AGW) is a web traffic manager for your web applications (one or multiple)

• With AGW, on top of load balancing your workloads, you can make routing decisions based on URI path or host headers.

• It can be used to do TLS/SSL termination. TLS/SSL termination can be useful to allow unencrypted traffic between AGW and backend servers saving some of processing load needed to encrypt and decrypt said traffic. Application Gateway also supports end-to-end TLS/SSL encryption.

• It includes a web application firewall called Web application firewall (WAF) that protects your workload from common exploits like SQL injection attacks or cross-site scripting attacks, to name a few.

• It provides application delivery controller (ADC) as a service, offering various Layer 7 load-balancing capabilities. Use it to optimize web farm productivity by offloading CPU-intensive SSL termination to the gateway.

How is Azure Application Gateway used?

It primarily provides a complete, cloud based, secure and scalable load balancing solution for web applications and services. Some ways to use it include;

• Deliver and manage load balancing solution for website, web applications or internet based services

• Provide load balancing for internal web enabled / powered services

• Deliver cookie based session affinity service

• Enable SSL offloading service that takes the encryption / decryption burden out of the primary web server

Application gateway end to end communication -

Application Gateway includes the following features :

• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL/TLS) termination

• Autoscaling

• Zone redundancy

• Static VIP

• Web Application Firewall

• Ingress Controller for AKS

• URL-based routing

• Multiple-site hosting

• Redirection

• Session affinity

• Websocket and HTTP/2 traffic

• Connection draining

• Custom error pages

• Rewrite HTTP headers and URL

• Sizing

Application Gateway Configuration

For Application Gateway, there are two SKUs that are available – v1 SKUs and v2 SKUs. Each of this SKUs has two tiers – Standard and Web Application Firewall (WAF). So, Azure offers four different tiers for application gateway.

• Standard

• Standard v2

• WAF

• WAF v2

Feature comparison between v1 SKU and v2 SKU –