Content Switching

When deploying solutions on Microsoft Azure a single external IP address is provided by Azure and published on the internet to provide access. This is true for both the Azure classic deployment and the new Azure Resource Manager deployment models, although the details of how they publish the IP address are different. Most organizations using Azure will require multiple different services to be available from their Azure solution. As a result these multiple services will need to be made available via the single published IP address. It is also important to keep the user experience simple and to provide simple URLs for each service that will be accessed on Azure.

This can be achieved using the ability of the free Azure LoadMaster to route traffic and requests based on their content, so that the correct server or service on Azure gets the request. For example, LoadMaster can detect requests for virtual directories such as /mobile/ or /secure/ and redirect the requests to the appropriate Azure servers. These Azure servers do not need to be in the same Azure regions, as internal Azure virtual IP addressing will be used to communicate with the LoadMaster. As many rules as required can be added to the LoadMaster to rewrite requests and send them to appropriate Azure servers, including having multiple rules for services if required.