What is Application Gateway?

Definition: An Application Gateway is a request redirector (or Web traffic load balancer), based on the HTTP request data.

• A load balancer does the same magic based on the incoming request IP address and Port and redirects to the appropriate destination IP address and port.
• Application gateway can be used when we want to redirect the request based on the HTTP request data.
• When you receive traffic from a specific web address, you can redirect it to a specific machine to process that request. That means you can send traffic from a specific web address to a specific VM.
• Application gateway makes the redirect decision based on the additional HTTP attributes like URI Path (http://example.com/Images OR http://example.com/Videos) or Host Header

Advantages of Application Gateways

• Scaling: You can scale the application Gateway up and down based on the amount of traffic/requests you receive.
• Data Security: Application Gateway has end-to-end encryption which helps to transfer data securely. You can also disable the encryption to process the requests faster if you wish to.
• Zone Availability: Application Gateway can span multiple Availability zones. You don’t need to add an additional Application Gateway for each zone.
• Multi-Site support: You can work with multiple websites using a single application gateway, you don’t need to keep adding a gateway for multiple sites, infect you can add up to 100 websites (Confirm this on Microsoft website) for processing.