Azure Application Gateway

Azure Application Gateway is a managed service provided on Azure that provides advanced load balancing capabilities. These capabilities include distributing traffic to multiple servers in a backend pool, SSL termination, URL-based routing, session affinity, and more. When it comes to API management (APIM), App Gateway is an essential component in providing secure and reliable access to APIs. By integrating Application Gateway with Azure API Management, engineers can leverage its advanced features to deliver scalable and secure APIs to their users. In this blog, we will take a closer look at App Gateway and explore how it integrates with other Azure services to provide an end-to-end API management solution. App Gateway is a layer-7 load balancer that provides advanced traffic management capabilities for web applications. It supports multiple protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, and WebSocket, and can be used to manage traffic to multiple backend servers. Some of the key features of App Gateway include:

• SSL termination: App Gateway can terminate SSL/TLS traffic on behalf of backend servers, reducing their workload and improving their performance.
• URL-based routing: Routing rules can be defined based on the URL of incoming requests to direct traffic to specific backend servers.
• Session affinity: App Gateway supports session persistence, which ensures that subsequent requests from the same user are sent to the same backend server.
• Web application firewall (WAF): App Gateway includes a WAF that provides protection against common web vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. App Gateway typically is placed behind an API Gateway - a core part of APIM - that bridges frontend services to backend services. APIM is a fully managed service that allows engineers to create, publish, and manage APIs. It provides a range of features such as authentication, caching, rate limiting, and more, and can be used to deliver APIs to internal and external users. By integrating App Gateway with other APIM services, engineers can create a scalable and secure API management solution that provides reliable access to APIs for internal and external users. The combination of App Gateway's advanced traffic management capabilities and API Management's powerful API management features makes it an ideal solution for robust software architecures.

If you want to see industry leading examples of how to deploy App Gateway via Terraform, check out this link: https://github.com/aztfmod/terraform-azurerm-caf/tree/main/examples/app_gateway. Azure CAF landing zone guides users to many different scenarios on how the infrastructure - including Azure App Gateway - can be deployed simply via code.