(This article is part of a series starting with Back to Basics - What is a Traffic Manager, Anyway?)
In the first article in this series, I used the example of a call center to show how an ADC or Traffic Manager helps to control the traffic flow in and out of applications. In this second installment, we will look at how Traffic Manager gives you much greater availability, performance and control of your application services.
Traffic Manager can be used to control the delivery of critical business applications and services. Whether those are external services, websites, APIs, email, or internal services - intranets, Exchange, SharePoint - Traffic Manager gives users three main benefits, Availability, Speed and Control:
1 - Availability and resiliency of services
Traffic Manager balances workloads and allows you to scale the capacity of your services. TrafficScript is a powerful scripting language, which lets you specify precisely what capabilities should be used for each individual user request. You can control load balancing and writing, specifying which groups of servers should handle which types of traffic.
2 – Speed Up Web Applications
Traffic Manager helps to speed up web applications with content caching and offloading of various tasks to let web servers on building web pages. Our protocol optimizations give you a better level of service, and you can support more customers per fixed unit of infrastructure capacity – more bangs for your buck. Meanwhile, TrafficScript also lets you inspect and modify requests and responses on the fly. Scrubbing out sensitive information in responses for data privacy, or blocking particular requests that you know may cause problems for your application.
3 - Control how users access services
To enhance customer experience for loyal customers, you can conditionally set parameters like bandwidth limits and rate shaping, to apply different priorities to different types of traffic. E.g. giving your “Gold” users a higher level of service in preference to “Silver” or “Bronze” customers.
So the strength of Traffic Manager comes from its ability to control how applications are delivered. Traffic Manager is available in different form factors:
- As software for Linux
- As a virtual appliance that can be deployed on any supported virtual infrastructure
- As a hardware appliance image for qualified server vendors
- Packaged for Public Clouds, such as AWS, Google and Azure
And our Community Edition allows you to use Traffic Manager completely free within your test and development environments to support the applications that you're building before you put them into production.
This article is part of a series:
1. Back to Basics - What is a Traffic Manager, Anyway?
2. Three ways to use Traffic Manager
3. How to set up Load Balancing with Traffic Manager
4. Health Monitoring with Traffic Manager
5. Controlling Service Levels with Traffic Manager
