Azure Front Door doesn't support Web Sockets

[mikepfeiffer]

Hello team,

Can we call out in this load balancing decision tree (or somewhere else in this doc) that Azure Front Door does not currently support web sockets?

AFD doesn't support Web Sockets:
MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs#29971 (comment)

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Document Details

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• ID: 936c85d9-c953-2def-c399-77cbda32b24d
• Version Independent ID: 9173c834-2c40-9169-b13b-6273759a2c8a
• Content: Overview of Azure load-balancing options - Azure Application Architecture Guide
• Content Source: docs/guide/technology-choices/load-balancing-overview.md
• Service: architecture-center
• Sub-service: reference-architecture
• GitHub Login: @sharad4u
• Microsoft Alias: pnp

[DixitArora-MSFT]

Hi @mikepfeiffer Thanks for your feedback. We will review and update as appropriate.

[absheik]

AB#160195 - Thanks for reporting - this issue is under review

[JsAndDotNet]

Having just tried front door and found it doesn't work with SignalR service, I'd like to +1 this. SignalR is a critical component for us (and many others), so we can't use front door at the moment.

Are there any thoughts as to when this will be included by please? It's a great product. Shame SignalR is preventing us using it.

[provanguard]

Apart from SignalR, please list other supported protocols and technologies in the decision tree. I am particularly interested in WCF. What choices do I have when some of the clients use WCF to communicate with some of the micro services behind the gateway/load balancer?

[crgarcia12]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/frontdoor/front-door-faq#when-should-we-deploy-an-application-gateway-behind-front-door

What protocols does Azure Front Door Service support? Azure Front Door Service supports HTTP, HTTPS and HTTP/2.

[absheik]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/application-gateway/application-gateway-websocket
App Gateway which is a regional service supports WebSockets. Closing the issue per above pr.

[dhananjaya94]

@absheik , any ETA on having Web Socket Support for Azure Front Door ? https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217313-networking/suggestions/37346371-support-websocket-connections-on-azure-front-door

[p-bojkowski]

NO ETA?

[Ulf-Ason]

@absheik Why is this issue closed? Does this mean that we should avoid Front Door if we have any plans to use Web sockets and instead use Application Gateway?

[dfendit]

Please re-open since it's not fixed yet. What if you need to use Front Door in combination with Application Gateway to let the user utilize Websockets and you have an environment which is spread over multiple regions. Merging CDN into Front Door was a big deal, but when will Websockets be?

[yehudamakarov]

This issue should not be closed, and the lack of clarity around this issue is a perfect example of serious problems with Azure as a whole.

• Scattered, conflicting documentation
• Incomplete, incompatible features being released
• A very obvious attempt to just cover up the problems these services have with each other, and how they don't support each other.

Similar examples including but not limited to

• Kafka api surface being supported by event hubs. It isn't fully supported and a lot of contradictory information is all over documentation, tutorials, and videos.
• IIS "supporting" http2 except for the features needed to run GRPC.

[yehudamakarov]

https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217313-networking/suggestions/37346371-support-websocket-connections-on-azure-front-door

does not exist anymore?

What's going on?

[XVII]

They've nuked the feedback.azure.com site. What a pain.

Got a support case open and they said maybe this half of the calendar year. I'll try remember to post here if I hear anything.

[joshjohanning]

They've nuked the feedback.azure.com site. What a pain.

Got a support case open and they said maybe this half of the calendar year. I'll try remember to post here if I hear anything.

Found this archive.org cache: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021111026/https://feedback.azure.com/forums/217313-networking/suggestions/37346371-support-websocket-connections-on-azure-front-door

[dfendit]

still no redemption ... I will ask the product team and circle back to this thread

[gball14]

The team is actively working on enabling to websockets on Azure Front Door. Currently, we are tracking for tentative ETA of March 2023.

[joeljanke]

The team is actively working on enabling to websockets on Azure Front Door. Currently, we are tracking for tentative ETA of March 2023.

Here we are in January 2023. Still looking like delivery in March 2023 for web sockets @gball14 ?

[montyplattner]

@gball14, Following-up on joeljanke's question. Will there be a public preview for this feature in March? Has the roadmap timeline changed at all since your comment in October 2022?

[mrbergeron83]

Any update on websocket for front door? I believe this topic is important enough to have a clear channel of communication

[nagyleventeboldizsar]

Hello There :) any updates?

[Ziiimon]

I would also be very interested to see if there is an update on this. I know there is a workaround via the application gateway for this, but it would be very beneficial if Azure Front Door would support this natively.

[Jarod1662]

@gball14 - Hi, any update on this?

[KonstantinSolv]

Why is this item Closed?

We are also eagerly waiting on websocket support...

[guardrex]

@gball14 ... I'm still maintaining a remark in the official Blazor docs Threat Mitigation topic on this. Since the work seems to have been tracked internally, you'll have to tell us (me) here if WebSockets support for Azure Front Door was instituted, possibly just as a public preview, on target last month (March). From the still-open Azure feedback site at ...

https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/idea/c8b1d257-8a26-ec11-b6e6-000d3a4f0789

... it doesn't look like it's been implemented yet ... or at least there was no update from the team there as to what's going on with it. What's the current status?

[adeturner]

Any update on the ETA?

[guardrex]

I've opened a new GH issue to try and get an update. I recommend to the community to add 👍 (thumbs up) on my opening comment.

There's no need to add comments to the issue, as that just generates lot of annoying email pings for everyone. ONLY add a 👍 (thumbs up) to my opening comment.

That's all that's needed to add support for the ask to get information on where the feature is on their roadmap.

Here's the new issue 👉 #4011

[mpicard]

Update?

[aiakubovich]

@gball14

updates???

[bartvdbraak]

Why are there literally no updates on this?

[darena-patrick]

new issue:
#4011
Also closed with no clear answer

[ckittel]

One of the main reasons is that this is an issue tracker for content across all of the Azure Architecture Center and isn't routinely monitored by anyone that deals with product roadmap for AFD. Occasionally, you'll get someone with some roadmap knowledge that happens to catch it, but it's usually not within any product team's remit to monitor this GitHub issue list related to content bugs for product roadmap questions. The original question was a content question, which was totally on topic, but going into timing of feature releases is something the content team here is not positioned to facilitate.

[coreydeli]

Come on there has to be an update here @Naveenommi-MSFT @guardrex @sharad4u

[calinpavel787]

Update on my side: I'm able to run the Blazor Server 7.0 on Windows & Linux App Service with Front Door and WAF policy.

[joshuadmatthews]

@calinpavel787 through Front Door??

[darena-patrick]

I'm able to too- but only if I use Azure SignalR coupled with it

[joshuadmatthews]

But where is the Front Door we sockets support? Why are all of these tickets for it closed with seemingly nothing released? Am I missing something? Been watching these for years

[garrettlondon1]

Any update here?

[ckittel]

I'll say this again, and I'm sorry, but this issue thread is not monitored in an official way that would be used to answer this question. This closed issue is on an issue tracker that is related to reporting bugs in content on https://learn.microsoft.com. Everyone is welcome to keep asking here for updates on product features, but please don't be expect an answer to this product feature timeline question from a content bug thread.

Matter of fact, if you haven't seen the announcements GitHub issues will be closing down for content teams like ours and this issue will stop existing when that happens to this repo. To that end, I strongly recommend you take this conversation to Microsoft Q&A or another channel to carry on the conversation.

Try one of: https://learn.microsoft.com/search/?terms=websocket%20front%20door&category=QnA or even better (HT @sopelt) directly on feedback.azure.com.

[T]his is an issue tracker for content across all of the Azure Architecture Center and isn't routinely monitored by anyone that deals with product roadmap for AFD. Occasionally, you'll get someone with some roadmap knowledge that happens to catch it, but it's usually not within any product team's remit to monitor this GitHub issue list related to content bugs for product roadmap questions. The original question was a content question, which was totally on topic, but going into timing of feature releases is something the content team here is not positioned to facilitate.

[sopelt]

Hello @ckittel ... I know that this is one of the most frustrating issues as neither the docs team nor the users can really contribute anything at this point without any involvement of the product team. ( ... and people could just react/upvote instead of asking for updates which creates noise for all subscribers or go to feedback.azure.com which is probably the better place for definitely missing features like this one. But yeah ... remember uservoice? :-/ )

I feel quite disheartened by the planned changes as our experience is that for every issue like this one there are so many productive exchanges resulting in immediate improvement of the docs, comments from others having similar use-cases, workarounds and even feedback to/from the product teams.

Right now I really dread the migration as it looks like the plan is a webform to dump complaints into without any feedback/interaction/community (think "screaming into the void"). This is probably cheaper to operate but I can't see how it could have a positive effect on quality.

[ckittel]

I really dread the migration as it looks like the plan is a webform to dump complaints into without any feedback/interaction/community (think "screaming into the void").

I'm sure a lot of folks share this concern both internally and externally (but obviously not all). While I can't speak for anyone else in this universe, you can personally count me as one of them. Dialog is very helpful for me, as a content owner, to be able to get to the root of content issues. Especially with the people that take the time to engage with a feedback system that allows everyone to clarify their thoughts and asks through iterative, async dialog.