How to load balance azure website

Question

Is it possible (and how) to load balance Azure web sites?

Situation is that I have a web site which I deployed to few redundant nodes. Now I would like to set up load balancing for reliability purposes.

I see that load balancing is done using Traffic Manager service which I tried to use, however Traffic Manager doesn't allow me to add a web site endpoint. It only allows me to add a custom virtual machine I have. On a side note, web sites are running in standard mode which means each runs on it's own VM which led me to believe I could load balance them.

I see people create separate VMs with Windows Server and use IIS ARR to perform actual web request load balancing. Is there a way in Azure to load balance web sites directly?

Answer 1

Another option can be Azure Traffic Manager. Now it supports web sites as well. Refer to the below link. The link talks about implementing Azure Traffic Manager for cloud service however same can be used with web sites - http://sanganakauthority.blogspot.com/2014/06/performance-load-balancing-using-azure.html

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

While converting over to web roles can very well suit your needs, an easier alternative may be to simply promote the web site up to the 'standard' tier, then increase the instance count. Windows Azure will then automatically handle load balancing the instances and even help ensure session affinity (which web roles can't do unless you jump through additional hoops).

Answer 3

Why not make your sites use Web Roles?

This only requires a very small change to the project to add a startup class.

These are automatically load balanced. You are required to have at least two role instances to trigger the SLA.