Azure load-balancing options

Load balancing refers to the process of distributing incoming network traffic uniformly across a group of backend server also known as server farm to optimize network efficiency, reliability and capacity.

Microsoft provides a good documentation which describes load-balancing options in Azure. Here is a quick summary of load-balancing options in Azure.

Options	Azure Front Door	Traffic Manager	Application Gateway	Azure Load Balancer
Description	It offers Layer 7 capabilities for your application like SSL offload, path-based routing, fast failover, caching, etc. to improve performance and high-availability of your applications.	DNS-based traffic load balancer that enables you to distribute traffic optimally to services across global Azure regions, while providing high availability and responsiveness.	Provides application delivery controller (ADC) as a service, offering various Layer 7 load-balancing capabilities.	Zone-redundant, high-performance, low-latency Layer 4 load-balancing service (inbound and outbound) for all UDP and TCP protocols.
OSI Layer	Layer 7 (Application Layer)		Layer 7 (Application Layer)	Layer 4 (Transport Layer)
Global/regional	Global	Global	Regional	Regional
Traffic type	HTTP(S)	non-HTTP(S)	HTTP(S)	non-HTTP(S)
SLA	99.99%	99.99%	99.95%	99.99%
Routing	Reverse proxy. AFD uses reverse proxy which provides faster failover support. Also uses AnyCast & Split TCP.	DNS routing. DNS-based load-balancing service that operates only at the domain level.	It acts as a reverse proxy service. This terminates the client connection and forwards request to back endpoints.	This provides network level distribution but essentially only with the same azure data centre.
SSL Offload	Available		Available
WAF features	Available		Available
Caching	Available

The following flowchart is really helpful to identify best load balancing option for your application.

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Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/guide/technology-choices/load-balancing-overview

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