Introduction
Today I was setting up a Traffic Manager deployment in Resource Manager. I wanted a rather “simple” failover scenario where my secondary site would only take over when my primary site was down. As you might now, there are several routing methods, where “failover” is one ;
Failover: Select Failover when you have endpoints in the same or different Azure datacenters (known as regions in the Azure classic portal) and want to use a primary endpoint for all traffic, but provide backups in case the primary or the backup endpoints are unavailable.
Though I was surprised that the naming between the “classic mode” (“the old portal“) and “resource manager” (“the new portal“) were different!
“Classic Mode” / Service Management
So when taking a look at “classic mode”, we see three methods ;
They are described fairly in-depth on the documentation page, though in short ;
- Performance : You’ll be redirected to the closest endpoint (based on network response in ms)
- Round Robin : The load will be distributed between all nodes. Depending on the weight of a node, one might get more or less requests.
- Failover : A picking order will be in place. The highest ranking system alive will receive the requests.
“New Portal” / Resource Manager
When taking a look at “Resource Manager”, we’ll see (again) three methods ;
Though the naming differs… When going into the technical details, it’s more a naming thing than a technical thing. The functionalitity is (give of take) the same. Where the “Round Robin” had the option of weights (1-1000) before, this now seems a focal point. Where “Failover” was working with a list (visualizuation), you can now directly alter the “priority” (1-1000) of each endpoint.
The info when checking out the routing method from within the portal ;
- Performance: Use this method when your endpoints are deployed in different geographic locations, and you want to use the one with the lowest latency.
- Priority: Use this method when you want to select an endpoint which has highest priority and is available.
- Weighted: Use this method when you want to distribute traffic across a set of endpoints as per the weights provided.
TL;DR
Where the naming differs between the two stacks, the functionality remains the same ;
- Performance didn’t get renamed
- Round Robin became “weighted”
- Failover became “priority
