Load Balancing and Content Delivery

by
Rob Helm

by
Rob Helm

As managing vice president, Rob Helm covers Microsoft collaboration services and client software. His 25-plus years of experience analyzing Microsoft’s... more

Load-balancing services distribute incoming network traffic among multiple hosts in Azure. They can enhance scalability, reduce downtime, and harden security for networked applications and simplify the work of application developers.

Product: Load Balancing and Content Delivery

Near-Term (2026–2027)

Application Gateway plans focus on AI and containers (generally available Nov. 2025). Current previews include extensions for load-balancing requests to large language models (LLMs), and for securing Internet connections to applications built with Istio, a Kubernetes component for messaging applications. WAF in Application Gateway adds reports and other tools to help analyze attack patterns and other risks.

Front Door customers could find it simpler to enforce their own security policies and customize traffic handling in other ways. In particular, Front Door will be able to run customer-supplied “edge actions,” JavaScript code that can route and filter traffic. Front Door customers to date have made these kinds of changes in a proprietary rule system, but JavaScript could prove easier for developers to learn and easier for Microsoft to support.