Chapter 11. Managing network traffic and routing

Domain Name Service (DNS) resolution is at the heart of almost every digital connection you make. It’s how you browse the web, receive email, watch Netflix, and make Skype calls. DNS is the mechanism that translates a name, such as manning.com, into an IP address. When I want to learn a new topic, I don’t need to remember 35.166.24.88—I just enter manning.com in a web browser and browse some books! Network devices route traffic based on IP addresses, so you need an approach that helps those of us with bad memories to do things like buy books or pizza online.

Over the last few chapters, we’ve spent a lot of time learning about how to build applications that can scale, are highly available, and are globally distributed. One of the last missing pieces is how to direct customers from around the world to the most appropriate application instance, typically the instance closest to them. Azure Traffic Manager makes it easy to automatically route customers to your application instances based on performance or geographic location. In this chapter, we discuss how you can create and manage DNS zones in Azure, and then how to use Traffic Manager to route customers with DNS queries, as shown in figure 11.1.

Figure 11.1. In this chapter, we examine how you can create DNS zones in Azure DNS. To minimize latency and improve response times, Traffic Manager can then be used to query DNS and direct customers to their closet application instance.

Chapter 11. Managing network traffic and routing

Figure 11.1. In this chapter, we examine how you can create DNS zones in Azure DNS. To minimize latency and improve response times, Traffic Manager can then be used to query DNS and direct customers to their closet application instance.

11.1. What is Azure DNS?

11.2. Global routing and resolution with Traffic Manager

11.3. Lab: Deploying web apps to see Traffic Manager in action