Azure Front Door Reviews

If you have a web application in the back end, that's what the Front Door is for: you have to have a web application firewall.

Microsoft's Web Application Firewall is designed for the Application Gateway and regional load balancing, or global balancing with Front Door.

It works perfectly and you can assign as many web application firewall policies as you want to the same instance of Front Door.

While Front Door works on Layer 7, Traffic Manager works on Layers 3 and 4, and is mainly a DNS router. You can use either one. But, if you have web applications, Front Door can provide you with a much richer toolset, especially when it comes to security, directing traffic, and rewriting the header and the URL.

There is room for improvement and they're working on it. Every six months they come out with a preview of changes.

Front Door is a global load balancer on Layer 7 and you use it with the Azure Web Application Firewall.

Azure Front Door's stability is very nice.

The only thing you need to do is to create your Web Application Firewall files. It's that simple. You don't need to create a custom balancer because Microsoft covers that in the application. 

It's a piece of cake to maintain. Usually, when I design it, I train the staff on each resource for around three to four hours. Within two to three days, they are up and running and know how to manage it.

They concentrated on Layer 7. If you go to the portal, you'll see that they put the load balancer in just one service, whether it is Application Gateway, Azure Load Balancer, or Front Door. They then ask you a question: "Do you want local, regional, or global?" and they will tell you which one to choose.

However, you could use the web application firewall with Front Door without needing it. If you are worried about the traffic going out from your infrastructure—if there is anything malicious there—the web application firewall will not do TLS. It's just for incoming traffic. That's what Azure Firewall does.

Our website is built through a Gatsby process and generic static files. All the static content for the site gets hosted in the CDN. We use Azure Front Door as an entry point for it.

The solution has improved our organization by allowing us to utilize the Rules Engine feature.

Rules Engine is a valuable feature. It is pretty easy to understand. It helps us to enforce HTTPS. We are also able to set up content security policies. Injecting the response headers for the content security policies is helpful. It prevents malicious intents. We basically tell the browser to only allow content from acceptable locations.

I ran into an issue when I was setting up the rules. There's a limitation on the amount of global rules we can add. Rules Engine takes one big long string when we input the values. For example, if I insert a header name and a header value, it's one big long string that gets truncated. It would be nice to see all of it, or it could be broken down into the actual values.

I have been using the solution for three years.

The tool's stability has been rock solid. We haven't experienced any outages.

We haven't had any scalability issues with the solution. We have one instance. We use the tool for a public-facing website. At our peak, we may have 400 users. We're hoping it reaches 1000 soon.

The documentation is excellent. I can figure out what I need through the documentation. I rate the documentation an eight or a nine out of ten.

We have seen an ROI on the solution. It's super helpful to be able to do the rules. It is also helpful that everything's in Azure. It's easy to use Azure and have it be part of our subscription.

We have to undergo a security evaluation. Without the rules, we wouldn't have passed the evaluation. The solution has helped us save time and money. We do not have to go through a whole build process and deployment to inject the security headers we need. We can add a rule and inject it simply. I recommend the product to others. The solution is great for my use case.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

I generally use Front Door to assist with clients' global or reachable applications. That includes disaster recovery scenarios and the like. I work as a consultant for several clients. 

The most valuable feature for me is the web application firewall included in the product. The solution is easily customized.

This is a relatively expensive solution. 

I've been using this solution for several years. 

The solution is very stable. 

Because it's on the cloud, the solution is scalable by nature. 

Back when it was a new product, we contacted the technical support a few times. We were lucky to be on some kind of program with direct access to the support. They were excellent. 

The initial setup is quite easy and then there's an amount of work required to get it configured and so on. The deployment takes around half a day and then another half hour or so for the other aspects. 

Licensing costs are quite expensive. 

I'm a big Microsoft user and I think this is an excellent product because it does  what it needs to do. It's my first choice when it fits the use case. 

We tend to use every aspect of the product. We use Azure Front Door, the Web Application Firewall on Front Door, and the Application Gateway. We implement all of these solutions for our customers. It depends on the need of our customers. The solution supports a lot of data publishing work.

The price is one of the most important aspects of the product. It's quite affordable.

The ease of the implementation is a helpful aspect. It's really, really vital. It's very easy to implement for our customers. We simply handle the first phase and Microsoft does all the rest. The cloud makes it easy. The deployment is fast.

I'm not a product specialist. There are other people in the company I work for and they are specialists in each of the products of Microsoft. I'm responsible for the governance and cost control of Azure. I'm not a specialist in any products and therefore I couldn't really speak effectively to features that are lacking or missing.

We tend to only focus on Microsoft products, including Azure.

The setup is not overly complex or difficult. It's quite easy to implement. The deployment is fast and is mostly handled by Microsoft. It's a great aspect of the product overall.

We help our clients implement the solution.

The pricing is pretty good. It's reasonably priced in general.

We are a Microsoft partner. We implement a lot of products from Microsoft for our customers. We're a partner specializing in Azure and therefore we implement many features that Azure has. We implement Azure Front Door and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway.

Usually, Azure is a public cloud. We deploy only Azure. We don't deploy anything on-prem and so we deploy AWS specifically only in the Azure cloud. A lot of our clients these days are moving over to the cloud, and we are assisting with that process.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use it for external security filtering to protect our external traffic that is coming into Azure.

It inspects the traffic at the network level before it comes into Azure. We can do SSL offloading, and it can detect abnormalities before the traffic comes into the application. 

It can be used globally and is easy to set up. It is also quite stable and scalable.

We should be able to use Front Door defenders with multiple cloud vendors. Currently, they can be used only with the Azure cloud. Azure Front Door should also be able to do global load balancing and provide internal front door services.

Microsoft should clearly define what Traffic Manager, Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door products do. These are similar products, and people get confused between these products.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is quite stable.

It is easily scalable. It is set up for the enterprise, and it is a global task manager. 

Their technical support is pretty good.

Its initial setup is easy.

It is on a pay-as-you-go basis.

I would rate Azure Front Door an eight out of ten.