Tours and Travel Company: A Case Study on Optimized Booking Systems with Azure

The CTO of the Tours and Travel Company marveled at how their booking system efficiently handled the surge in ‘summer vacation traffic’ without a hitch. This success was due to the seamless synergy between Azure's Application Gateway and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) implemented by our team of cloud services professionals.

The Importance of Digital Integration

In our collaboration with a travel agency, we've seen first-hand how vital websites and online transactions have become extremely efficient in their daily operations and customer engagement. By embracing a robust digital platform, the agency offered seamless online booking and payment solutions, making it convenient for customers to plan and pay for their dream vacations from anywhere in the world. With our help, they developed a user-friendly website that not only showcased travel packages and real-time availability but also facilitated secure transactions and personalized itineraries. This digital integration has significantly enhanced their customer’s travel planning experience, increased the agency’s reach and efficiency, and positioned them as a leader in the modern travel market.

Components Used

The architecture of this optimized system includes several key components:

• UAT Server
• Database Server
• Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)
• Azure Application Gateway
• Azure CDN
• Azure Storage Account
• Azure DNS

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) is a service that allows for the deployment and management of a group of identical virtual machines (VMs) as a scalable set. VMSS enables automatic scaling of VM instances based on demand or a predefined schedule, ensuring applications can handle varying workloads efficiently. It simplifies deployment and management by treating multiple VMs as a unified unit, making it easier to maintain consistency across instances and apply updates seamlessly.

Azure Application Gateway

Azure Application Gateway is a layer 7 load balancer service that manages traffic to web applications. It provides advanced traffic distribution capabilities based on URL routing, SSL termination for offloading encryption tasks, and Web Application Firewall (WAF) functionality to protect against common web vulnerabilities. Application Gateway improves the availability and scalability of applications by distributing traffic among multiple backend servers or pools of virtual machines (VMs).

Azure CDN

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a global service that accelerates the delivery of high-bandwidth content to users around the world. It improves website performance by caching static content at strategically distributed edge locations close to end-users, reducing latency and improving responsiveness.

Synergy between VMSS and Application Gateway

Azure VMSS and Azure Application Gateway work hand in hand to efficiently manage a client's infrastructure hosting 20 websites. VMSS automates the scaling of virtual machines to handle fluctuating traffic demands across these websites, ensuring consistent performance without manual adjustments. This setup allows for unified management of identical VM instances, streamlining deployment and maintenance efforts across all 20 websites, optimizing operational efficiency and reliability.

Azure Application Gateway enhances this setup by serving as a sophisticated layer 7 load balancer, efficiently distributing incoming traffic to the appropriate VM instances within the scale set. This load balancing capability not only optimizes resource utilization but also supports URL-based routing for each website, enabling tailored traffic management and application-specific configurations. With SSL termination offloaded to the Application Gateway, the VMs focus solely on processing website logic, further enhancing overall performance.

Enhanced security is provided by the Web Application Firewall (WAF), protecting websites from common vulnerabilities. Integrating Azure CDN ensures high-bandwidth content is delivered swiftly, reducing latency and improving responsiveness. Comprehensive monitoring through Azure Monitor and Azure Log Analytics ensures proactive issue resolution.

The dynamic allocation of resources based on real-time demand means VMSS can scale out during peak periods and scale in during off-peak times, ensuring cost-effectiveness. This approach minimizes downtime, maintains high performance, and ensures secure communications through SSL termination at the Application Gateway.

The case of this Tours and Travel Company exemplifies the benefits of the integration of VMSS and Application Gateway. By transitioning to VMSS and Application Gateway, the company experienced improved performance, reliability, and customer satisfaction. This synergy provides a powerful solution for managing web infrastructure efficiently.

Application Gateway's Role in Traffic Management

Azure Application Gateway orchestrates website redirection and workflow management through its robust backend health monitoring, rules, listeners, and SSL termination capabilities. Backend health probes continuously monitor the status of backend servers or pools by periodically sending requests to check responsiveness. Unhealthy servers are automatically detected and removed from rotation, ensuring that only healthy servers handle incoming traffic, thereby maintaining high availability and reliability.

Listeners in Application Gateway listen for incoming traffic on specific ports and protocols, such as HTTP or HTTPS. They enable secure connections through SSL termination, where Application Gateway decrypts incoming SSL/TLS traffic, processes it, and forwards it to backend servers as unencrypted HTTP or re-encrypts it for communication with the backend.

Rules define how incoming requests are processed based on criteria like URL path, host headers, or SSL certificates. URL-based routing rules allow Application Gateway to redirect requests to different backend pools or URLs based on configured conditions.

This workflow ensures that incoming requests are securely handled, routed, and redirected according to defined business logic. Application Gateway's integrated monitoring and routing capabilities optimize application performance, enhance security with SSL termination, and support flexible traffic management for complex web applications deployed in Azure environments. This comprehensive approach ensures seamless user experiences and reliable application delivery across global deployments.

Real-World Application

The company we worked with, based in Dubai, operates in the realm of tours and travels. With their previous infrastructure setup, they faced issues with system load and slow read-write times. We advised them to integrate Azure Web Apps with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure Application Gateway.

The current infrastructure includes a UAT Server for testing and development, while the Production server is hosted as a Virtual Machine Scale Set. The database server supports both UAT and Production environments. The UAT server's image is used in production only after thorough validation.

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure Application Gateway collaborate seamlessly to support a client managing 20 websites on the same infrastructure. VMSS automates the scaling of virtual machines based on varying traffic demands across these websites, ensuring optimal performance without manual intervention. Each website benefits from the unified management of identical VM instances, simplifying deployment and maintenance tasks across the board.

Application Gateway provides advanced traffic management capabilities such as URL-based routing and SSL offloading, optimizing the distribution of incoming requests and streamlining backend server operations. Its integration with Azure services and support for SSL termination, enhances security and improves performance by offloading encryption tasks. Additionally, Application Gateway supports Azure CDN integration, enabling efficient content delivery and global scalability for web applications hosted in Azure. This combination of features ensures reliable, high-performance application delivery while simplifying management and enhancing overall user experience.

Conclusion

Azure DNS, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS), and Azure Application Gateway collaborate seamlessly for efficient website hosting and delivery in Azure. Azure DNS manages domain names and DNS records, ensuring fast and reliable resolution of website addresses to Azure resources. VMSS automates the deployment and scaling of virtual machine instances based on traffic demand, optimizing performance and ensuring scalability. Azure Application Gateway serves as a layer 7 load balancer, directing incoming HTTP/HTTPS traffic to backend VM instances within the VMSS. It supports advanced traffic management features like URL-based routing and SSL termination, enhancing application delivery and security.

Together, these services enable organizations to achieve reliable, scalable, and secure website hosting in Azure, providing an optimal user experience globally while simplifying management and improving operational efficiency.