Azure Active Directory’s gateway service is a reverse proxy that fronts hundreds of services that make up Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). If you’ve used services such as office.com, outlook.com, azure.com or xbox.live.com, then you’ve used Azure AD’s gateway. The gateway provides features such as TLS termination, automatic failovers/retries, geo-proximity routing, throttling, and tarpitting to services in Azure AD. The gateway is present in more than 53 Azure datacenters worldwide and serves ~115 Billion requests each day. Up until recently, Azure AD’s gateway was running on .NET Framework 4.6.2. As of September 2020, it’s running on .NET Core 3.1.

Motivation for porting to .NET Core

The gateway’s scale of execution results in significant consumption of compute resources, which in turn costs money. Finding ways to reduce the cost of executing the service has been a key goal for the team behind it. The buzz around .NET Core’s focus on performance caught our attention, especially since TechEmpower listed ASP.NET Core as one of the fastest web frameworks on the planet. We ran our own benchmarks on gateway prototypes on .NET Core and the results made the decision very easy: we must port our service to .NET Core.

#.net #.net core #azure #.net core 3.1 #azure