Azure Traffic Manager: Redirect Request based on Custom Logic

Question

I am implementing OData using ASP.NET Web API 2.2. These are deployed as Azure Web roles in different Azure Data centers where data is present in SQL Azure DBs. If there is a request coming from the user, the request has to be redirected to a particular web role deployed in based on the user details.
I am still exploring Azure Traffic Manager capabilities. Is it the way to do it in Azure? or what is the right approach for such scenarios in Azure?

Answer 1

This is not possible using Azure Traffic Manager. Traffic Manager simply does DNS resolution based on the policy (perf, round robin, failover) you choose.

If you want to intelligently route customers based on some logic then I would suggest:

1. First, are you sure you want to do this? A key tenant of a highly scalable and available service is that a request can be served by any instance/deployment, and it is more important to get the request to the fastest deployment (ie. the perf profile for WATM). There are valid reasons to need to direct users to a specific service, but I would suggest taking a hard look at this design requirement.
2. You could use ARR or URL Rewrite to internally fetch data from the correct deployment. This may have perf implications, but would be easy to implement.
3. As Brendan mentioned in a comment, you could have a thin web API layer that just does a 302 redirect to send the user to the correct deployment.