Azure Application Gateway
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. It operates at the application layer (OSI layer 7) and provides features like SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and URL-based routing. It is designed to improve application performance, security, and scalability by distributing incoming requests across multiple backend servers.
Developers should use Azure Application Gateway when building scalable web applications on Azure that require advanced traffic management, such as microservices architectures or multi-tenant applications. It is ideal for scenarios needing SSL offloading to reduce backend server load, A/B testing with path-based routing, or protecting applications with integrated Web Application Firewall (WAF) capabilities. This tool simplifies deployment by handling complex routing rules and ensuring high availability.