There are a ton of useful Azure resources, and one that I don’t read or hear a lot about is Azure Traffic Manager.

According to the docs:

Azure Traffic Manager is a DNS-based traffic load balancer. This service allows you to distribute traffic to your public facing applications across the global Azure regions. Traffic Manager also provides your public endpoints with high availability and quick responsiveness.

Meaning it’s a very good service to make sure the requests to your backend are routed to the backend that’s able to respond the fastest. I’m using this service for two of my side-projects, the URL-minifier service, and the Guid service. The services are deployed to the United States, Europe and Australia, making sure just about everyone will have a similar experience in terms of speed.
An added benefit is you get high availability too, because if one region is down, requests will be routed to another region.

It’s also very cheap to use, about $0,50 per billion requests per month.
When combined with Cloudflare as a CDN and frontline DNS, it’s costing me just about nothing to use.

The setup

You can add the Azure Traffic Manager via the Azure Portal and add Endpoints to the resource. There are different type of endpoints you can use.

Most people who are professionally working with any of the cloud providers use some kind of infrastructure-as-code solution.
For Microsoft Azure, I’m mostly working with ARM- or Bicep templates to describe the resources necessary. While I’ve written ARM templates for years now, I’m enjoying creating Bicep templates a bit more due to the tooling it offers.

There is at least one downside to using these solutions, and that’s the fact most operations are happening on the Azure control plane. Often times this is good enough, as you only need to deploy some resources, specify some values to the resources, and be done with it. However, there are cases where you also need to invoke some actions which require the creation of data, identities, or trigger some kind of endpoint.
To facilitate this need, there’s a special kind of resource in Azure called deploymentScripts.

What are deploymentScripts?

As it’s mentioned in the docs, these scripts can be used to perform lots of custom actions, like:

• Add users to a directory.
• Perform data plane operations, for example, copy blobs or seed database.
• Look up and validate a license key.
• Create a self-signed certificate.
• Create an object in Azure AD.
• Look up IP Address blocks from custom system.

The benefits of deployment script:

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