Azure Load Balancer’s international tier is a cloud-native international community load balancing answer. With cross-region Load Balancer, clients can distribute site visitors throughout a number of Azure areas with ultra-low latency and excessive efficiency. To raised perceive the use case of Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer, let’s dive deeper right into a buyer situation. On this weblog, we’ll find out about a buyer, their use case, and the way Azure Load Balancer got here to the rescue.

Who can profit from Azure Load Balancer?

This instance buyer is a software program vendor within the automotive business. Their present product choices are cloud–based mostly software program, targeted on serving to automobile dealerships handle all facets of their enterprise together with gross sales leads, autos, and buyer accounts. Whereas it’s a international firm, most of its enterprise is completed in Europe, the UK (UK), and Asia Pacific areas. To help its international enterprise, the client makes use of a variety of Azure providers together with digital machines (VMs), quite a lot of platform as a service (PaaS) options, Load Balancer, and MySQL to assist meet an ever-growing demand.

What are the present international load balancing options?

The client is utilizing area title service (DNS)–based mostly site visitors distribution to direct site visitors to a number of Azure areas. At every Azure area, they deploy regional Azure Load Balancers to distribute site visitors throughout a set of digital machines. Nonetheless, if a area went down, they skilled downtime on account of DNS caching. Though minimal, this was not a threat they might proceed to tackle as their enterprise expanded globally.

What are the issues with the present options?

For the reason that buyer’s answer is international, as site visitors elevated, they seen excessive latency when requesting info from their endpoints throughout areas. For instance, customers situated in Africa seen excessive latency after they tried to request info. Typically their requests have been routed to an Azure area on one other continent, which precipitated the excessive latency. Answering requests with low latency is a crucial enterprise requirement to make sure enterprise continuity. Because of this, they wanted an answer that withstood regional failover, whereas concurrently offering ultra-low latency with excessive efficiency.

How did Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer assist?

On condition that low latency is a requirement for the client, a world layer 4 load balancer was an ideal answer to the issue. The client deployed Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer, giving them a single distinctive globally anycast IP to load steadiness throughout their regional workplaces. With Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer, site visitors is distributed to the closest area, making certain low latency when utilizing the service. For instance, if a buyer linked from Asia Pacific areas, site visitors is robotically routed to the closest area, on this case Southeast Asia. The client was ready so as to add all their regional load balancers to the backend of the cross-region Load Balancer and thus improved latency with none extra downtime. Earlier than the replace was deployed throughout all areas, the client verified that their metrics for information path availability and well being probe standing are one hundred pc on each its cross-region Load Balancer and every regional Load Balancer.

 

After deploying cross-region Load Balancer, site visitors is now distributed with ultra-low latency throughout areas. For the reason that cross-region Load Balancer is a community load balancer, solely the TCP/UDP headers are rapidly inspected as a substitute of the complete packet. As well as, the cross-region Load Balancer will ship site visitors to the closest collaborating Azure area to a consumer. These advantages are seen by the client who now sees site visitors being served with decrease latency than earlier than.

Be taught Extra

Go to the Cross-region load balancer overview to be taught extra about Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer and the way it can match into your structure.