Taking advantage of the new Azure Application Gateway V2

Microsoft recently released Azure Application Gateway V2 and Web Application Firewall (WAF) V2.  These SKUs offer significant improvements and additional capabilities to customers for instance:

• Autoscaling allows elasticity for your application by scaling the application gateway as needed based on your application’s traffic pattern. You no longer need to run application gateway at peak provisioned capacity, therefore significantly saving on the cost.
• Zone redundancy enables your application gateway to survive zonal failures, offering better resilience to your application
• Static VIP feature ensures that your endpoint address will not change over its lifecycle
• Header Rewrite allows you to add, remove or update HTTP request and response headers on your application gateway, thus enabling various scenarios such as HSTS support, securing cookies, changing cache controls etc. without the need to touch your application code.
• Faster provisioning and configuration update time
• Improved performance for your application gateway helps reduce overall cost

Spanish Point provide Azure managed services for systems processing billons of transaction per month and for customers that have migrated all their systems to Azure and Microsoft other cloud services. We have worked with ISVs in finance, HR, engineering and animation to reengineer and re-platform their applications to Azure.

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Why should customers migrate to V2 SKUs?

• Features and improvements: You can take advantage of the improvements and capabilities mentioned above and continue to take advantage of new features in Microsoft’s roadmap as they are released. Going forward, most of the new features in the roadmap will only be released on the V2 SKU.
• Cost: V2 SKU may work out to be overall cheaper for you, relative to V1 SKU.
• Platform support in future: Microsoft will be disabling the creation of new gateways on the V1 SKU in the future, advance notification will be provided so customers have enough time to migrate. Migrating your gateways to the V2 SKU sooner rather than later will allow more engineering and support resources to the V2 SKU sooner.

Guided migration – Configuration replication to V2 SKU gateway

While customers can certainly do the migration on their own by manually configuring new V2 gateways with the same configuration as their V1 gateways, in reality, for many customers this could be quite complicated and error prone due to the number of configuration touchpoints that may be involved. To help with this, Microsoft recently published a PowerShell script along with documentation that helps replicate the configuration on a V1 gateway to a new V2 gateway.

The PowerShell script requires a few inputs and will seamlessly copy over the configuration from a specified V1 gateway to a new V2 gateway, the V2 gateway will be automatically created for you

Switching over traffic to new V2 endpoints

Completely up to the customer as the specifics of how the traffic flow through the application gateway is architected, vary from application to application and customer to customer. However, guidance is provided for some scenarios of traffic flow. Future tooling will also be considered to help customers with this phase, especially for customers using Azure DNS or Azure Traffic Manager to direct traffic to application gateways.

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