In 2019, a single safety breach in Capital One’s AWS infrastructure upended the enterprise. A misconfigured Net Utility Firewall (WAF) allowed an attacker to entry names, addresses, and checking account numbers of over 100 million prospects.  

The results? The financial institution holding firm needed to pay over $300 million in estimated complete prices together with fines, authorized charges and settlements.  

That is the worth of not safeguarding your cloud infrastructure within the trendy digital age. Milliseconds can price you tens of millions and trigger irreparable reputational harm. Happily, Azure offers a complete suite of providers that permit you to construct extremely obtainable, safe, and performant purposes. Amongst these cloud managed services, Azure Utility Gateway stands out as a sturdy instrument for each WAF safety and cargo balancing. 

Azure Utility Gateway is a completely managed utility supply controller (ADC) that gives numerous capabilities resembling load balancing, safe net site visitors administration, and clever routing.  Integrating WAF with load balancing units a stable basis to guard your net purposes from malicious assaults whereas dealing with site visitors volumes with excessive availability. 

On this weblog, we’ll dive deep into Azure Utility Gateway, discover the way it capabilities as each a WAF and cargo balancer, and the way you should utilize it to reinforce the safety and efficiency of your net purposes. 

What’s Azure Utility Gateway? 

Azure Utility Gateway is a layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancer that operates on the utility layer of the OSI mannequin. In contrast to conventional layer 4 load balancers, which take care of community site visitors (IP, TCP), Utility Gateway works with net site visitors and HTTP(S) requests, which makes it splendid for net purposes. 

It is sort of a site visitors controller that may perceive context. For instance, Utility Gateway ensures a request for a video stream doesn’t find yourself in the identical backend pool as a light-weight API name. Azure permits this granularity by way of path-based routing and multi-site internet hosting.  

Key options of Azure Utility Gateway 

Azure Utility Gateway presents a wealthy set of options designed to reinforce the 
efficiency, safety, and scalability of net purposes. These are essentially the most highly effective cloud safety options in its toolbox. 

1. Net utility firewall 

The net utility firewall is a key function of Azure Utility Gateway that helps shield your net purposes from frequent net vulnerabilities and assaults. WAF inspects incoming site visitors and blocks malicious requests, making certain that solely authentic site visitors reaches your net servers. It is a key safety instrument in all main cloud platforms, together with Azure cloud security and AWS cloud safety. 

WAF has the next core functionalities: 

• OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS): WAF makes use of the OWASP CRS for cloud risk detection and to stop assaults based mostly on the OWASP Prime 10 vulnerabilities, together with SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and distant file inclusion. 
• Customized Guidelines: You’ll be able to configure customized WAF guidelines to dam particular assault patterns based mostly in your utility’s necessities. 
• Actual-Time Monitoring: WAF integrates with Azure Monitor to offer real-time cloud monitoring and reporting about incoming site visitors, permitting you to determine and reply to safety threats shortly. 
• Safety Towards DDoS: Whereas WAF just isn’t a alternative for a devoted Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) cloud safety providers, it might assist mitigate some frequent sorts of assault site visitors. 

How WAF works 

When a request is made to your net utility, it passes by way of the Azure Utility Gateway. WAF inspects the request and performs checks based mostly on the outlined safety insurance policies. If the request matches any recognized assault patterns or customized guidelines, WAF blocks the request and sends an alert to Azure Monitor. 

2. Load balancing 

Azure Utility Gateway offers superior load balancing capabilities to distribute incoming site visitors throughout a number of backend servers. This ensures that your net purposes can deal with excessive site visitors volumes effectively and preserve excessive availability. It’s a core a part of cloud application development to make scalable, resilient, and high-performing net purposes that may deal with heavy person masses. 

Load balancing has these key options:  

• URL-based Routing: Direct site visitors to completely different backend swimming pools based mostly on URL paths. For instance, you possibly can route site visitors for instance.com/pictures to a backend pool devoted to serving pictures. 
• SSL Termination: Utility Gateway can offload SSL termination, decrypting HTTPS site visitors earlier than sending it to the backend servers. This reduces the load in your backend servers and simplifies certificates administration. 
• Session Affinity (Sticky Periods): Preserve session persistence by routing requests from the identical shopper to the identical backend server. That is helpful for purposes that retailer session knowledge regionally. 
• A number of Backend Swimming pools: You’ll be able to configure a number of backend swimming pools, permitting you to route site visitors to completely different units of servers based mostly on standards like URL path or host headers. 
• Autoscaling: The Utility Gateway can mechanically scale up or down based mostly on site visitors demand, making certain that you’ve got the fitting capability to deal with various workloads. 

How load balancing works 

When a shopper makes an HTTP(S) request to your utility, the Utility Gateway forwards the request to an obtainable backend server in one of many backend swimming pools. The Gateway makes use of algorithms like round-robin, least connections, or weighted round-robin to steadiness the site visitors throughout a number of servers. 

3. Multi-site internet hosting 

Azure Utility Gateway helps multi-site internet hosting, which implies you should utilize a single Utility Gateway occasion to host multiple applications or web sites. That is splendid for situations the place you will have a number of net purposes that share the identical IP handle however should be routed to completely different backend swimming pools based mostly on the area identify or URL path. 

Following are the important options of multi-site internet hosting: 

• Host-based Routing: Route site visitors based mostly on the area identify (e.g., app1.instance.com or app2.instance.com), sending it to completely different backend swimming pools. 
• Single IP for A number of Websites: Host a number of websites behind a single public IP handle, decreasing the necessity for added infrastructure. 

4. Autoscaling 

Azure Utility Gateway helps autoscaling, which mechanically adjusts the variety of cases based mostly on incoming site visitors. This ensures that the applying can deal with various site visitors masses with out handbook intervention. 

Autoscaling presents many advantages, resembling: 

• Value Effectivity: Solely pay for the sources you employ, as autoscaling adjusts capability dynamically. 
• Excessive Availability: Autoscaling ensures that your utility can preserve efficiency and reliability throughout site visitors spikes. 

5. SSL offloading 

SSL offloading permits you to terminate SSL connections on the Utility Gateway reasonably than at your backend servers. This reduces the load in your backend servers and simplifies SSL certificates administration. 

This helps you manage your cloud infrastructure by way of: 

• Diminished Backend Load: Offloading SSL termination reduces the CPU utilization in your backend servers, as they not must deal with encryption/decryption. 
• Simplified Certificates Administration: Handle SSL certificates centrally on the Utility Gateway, making it simpler to replace and renew certificates. 

Utilizing Azure Utility Gateway for WAF and cargo balancing 

Azure Utility Gateway is a robust answer for managing and securing net site visitors on account of its native integration of superior load balancing capabilities and a powerful WAF. Utility Gateway combines each to offer compelling benefits in efficiency and safety. 

Right here is how can arrange Azure Utility Gateway for WAF and cargo balancing: 

Step 1: Create an Utility Gateway 

1. Navigate to the Azure portal. 
2. Click on on Create a useful resource, and seek for Utility Gateway. 
3. Choose Utility Gateway and click on Create. 
4. Configure the Fundamental Settings (e.g., identify, area, and useful resource group). 
5. Select the SKU (Customary or WAF) and Digital Community. 

Step 2: Configure Backend Swimming pools 

1. Below Backend swimming pools, add backend servers or digital machine scale units. 
2. Outline the backend pool settings, such because the backend sort (VMs, IPs, or load balancers). 

Step 3: Set Up Routing Guidelines 

1. Configure URL-based routing or host-based routing to route site visitors to completely different backend swimming pools based mostly on the request URL or area identify. 
2. Arrange listeners for HTTP/HTTPS site visitors. 

Step 4: Allow Net Utility Firewall 

1. Below Net Utility Firewall, allow WAF and choose the suitable rule set (e.g., OWASP CRS). 
2. Customise WAF settings if wanted, and configure logging for real-time monitoring. 

Step 5: Configure Autoscaling and SSL Offloading 

1. Allow autoscaling to permit the Gateway to regulate capability based mostly on demand. 
2. Configure SSL termination if you’d like the Gateway to deal with SSL decryption. 

Step 6: Monitor and Check 

Use Azure Monitor to trace metrics resembling request depend, backend response occasions, and WAF alerts. Check the configuration by sending site visitors to your utility and verifying that it’s appropriately routed and guarded. 

Why use Utility Gateway for WAF and cargo balancing? 

Most different choices deal with WAF and cargo balancing as two separate entities. One handles efficiency, whereas the opposite handles safety. Utility Gateway breaks away from this siloed strategy and merges them for strategic positive factors.  

Consequently, it provides a number of advantages that ought to make it your first option to deploy WAF and cargo balancing. 

1. Unified Deployment 

A single interface for each efficiency tuning and safety guidelines means fewer providers to configure and pay for, which cuts down each operational complexity and latency. 

2. Improved Safety 

The built-in net utility firewall protects your purposes from frequent net vulnerabilities, together with SQL injection, XSS, and different OWASP Prime 10 threats. 

3. Excessive Availability and Scalability 

Utility Gateway mechanically scales based mostly on site visitors demand and ensures that your utility stays obtainable even throughout site visitors spikes. 

4. Centralized Administration 

Handle net site visitors, load balancing, and safety insurance policies from a single interface within the Azure portal. 

5. Value Effectivity 

With pay-per-use pricing and autoscaling, you solely pay for the sources you devour, which helps in Azure price optimization and makes it a cheap answer when managing Azure resources with Terraform.

6. Simplified SSL Administration 

Offload SSL termination to the Utility Gateway, simplifying certificates administration and decreasing the load in your backend servers. 

Conclusion 

Azure Utility Gateway is a shift in cloud infrastructure administration. It’s a necessary instrument for contemporary net purposes that aligns clever load balancing with real-time, adaptive WAF. Cloud adoption will proceed to develop as increasingly more companies are shifting to cloud infrastructures to modernize their digital operations.   

Nevertheless, this shift can even result in extra advanced digital threats and challenges, which implies companies should steadiness each excessive availability and cloud safety. In that case, Azure Utility Gateway is already the subsequent chapter within the enterprise IT trade with its forward-thinking strategy. 

Xavor is an authorized Microsoft Azure and AWS companion that provides trendy, scalable, and safe managed cloud providers. Our cloud consultants have the expertise and experience to handle your cloud sources utilizing all the most recent platforms and instruments like Azure Utility Gateway. 

Contact us now at [email protected] to e book a free session session with our cloud consultants.