How to use Azure Traffic Manager with a custom domain, if the DNS settings don't allow for forwarding

1
votes

I have an Azure web app up and running, using a custom domain purchased outside of Azure... and that all runs fine. So I have https://myappname.azurewebsites.net/ loading fine with my domain name URL https://www.myappname.com

I'm trying to upgrade the web app, though using Azure Traffic Manager. I've cloned the app a few times, each on its own app service plan, and I have the traffic manager all up and running fine. I can successfully hit different versions of my cloned website based on the traffic manager configuration profile... so no issues there.

The only issue is that I can only access the "traffic managed" version of my website via the standard azure URL -> myappname.trafficmanager.net.

All examples I've seen say all I really need to do now, is go into my DNS Management screen, and add domain forwarding, however, my online DNS management tool does not offer this option.

I can't really change my A record in the DNS management screen, because I don't know the IP address of myappname.trafficmanager.net

Every place I've tried to change the name of the current/working Azure URL (like in awverify text files, www cnames, etc.) does nothing. The DNS still points to the single instance which remains in the IP address od the DNS managers A record.

Also, since my live/single instance is linked to the domain name (along with the SSL binding), I can't add those properties to the clones, which makes sense....only one version can be live. However I could unbind that when I make the switch from the single instance web app to the traffic managed set of clones, but I fear I can only bind that to one of the clones. I can't seem to bind it to the myappname.trafficmanager.net version, which might cascade down to all of its endpoints. Is there a way to bind my domain name and SSL cert to more than one version of my web app?

Thanks!

1
azure-traffic-manager

1 Answers

0
votes

Is there a way to bind my domain name and SSL cert to more than one version of my web app?

I don't think you can do that unless you have two different domains or subdomains with each own SSL cert. Each web app hostname is unique globally and each SSL binding is attached with the web app domain name.

If you have a purchased domain and just keep the default xxx.azurewebsites.net as each hostname. Then you could configure the two Azure app serves as the endpoint of TM.

By default, Azure provided a wildcard cert for this domain *azurewebsites.net, so you can automatically access this hostname with HTTPS without any extra cert. Then use a CNAME record www in the domain domain.com in your DNS provider to point to the traffic manager hostname myappname.trafficmanager.net. Since Traffic Manager works as DNS level, it does not validate the server and client SSL, you could safely ignore the SSL warning when accessing with traffic manager hostname.

Feel free to let me know if you have any question.