In the previous post, I wrote about hosting a simple static website on an Azure Storage Account. To enable a custom URL such as https://blog.baeke.info, you can add Azure CDN. If you use the Verizon Premium tier, you can configure rules such as a http to https redirect rule. This is similar to hosting static sites in an Amazon S3 bucket with Amazon CloudFront although it needs to be said that the http to https redirect is way simpler to configure there.
On Twitter, Karim Vaes reminded me of the Azure Front Door service, which is currently in preview. The tagline of the Azure Front Door service is clear: “scalable and secure entry point for fast delivery of your global applications”.
The Front Door service is quite advanced and has features like global HTTP load balancing with instant failover, SSL offload, application acceleration and even application firewalling and DDoS protection. The price is lower that the Verizon Premium tier of Azure CDN. Please note that preview pricing is in effect at this moment.
Configuring a Front Door with the portal is very easy with the Front Door Designer. The screenshot below shows the designer for the same website as the previous post but for a different URL:
During deployment, you create a name that ends in azurefd.net (here geba.azurefd.net). Afterwards you can add a custom name like deploy.baeke.info in the above example. Similar to the Azure CDN, Front Door will give you a Digicert issued certificate if you enable HTTPS and choose Front Door managed:
Naturally, the backend pool will refer to the https endpoint of the static website of your Azure Storage Account. I only have one such endpoint, but I could easily add another copy and start load balancing between the two.
In the routing rule, be sure you select the frontend host that matches the custom domain name you set up in the frontend hosts section:
It is still not as easy as in CloudFront to redirect http to https. For my needs, I can allow both http and https to Front Door and redirect in the browser:
if(window.location.href.substr(0,5) !== 'https'){
window.location.href = window.location.href.replace('http', 'https');
}
Not as clean as I would like it but it does the job for now. I can now access https://deploy.baeke.info via Front Door!
baeke.info 