Does using Azure Load Balancer to provide access to an app deployed across multiple regions meet the requirements of rate limiting, load balancing, and regional outage access?

Using Azure Load Balancer by itself does not meet all the requirements outlined in the question. While it is an effective tool for distributing traffic across multiple instances of an application for load balancing, it does not inherently provide rate limiting capabilities. Rate limiting is a feature that controls the amount of incoming traffic a particular service or endpoint can handle, thereby protecting applications from being overwhelmed by too many simultaneous requests.

Additionally, Azure Load Balancer operates at layer 4 (transport layer) of the OSI model, which means it is limited to distributing incoming traffic based on IP address and port numbers, without any awareness of the content or application layer information needed for more advanced traffic management, such as rate limiting.

Regarding regional outage access, while load balancers can direct traffic to healthy instances in different regions, simply using Azure Load Balancer does not guarantee that an application is resilient to regional outages. A comprehensive design to meet these requirements would typically involve integrating other services and components, such as Azure Front Door or Application Gateway, which support features like global load balancing and rate limiting, combined with appropriate routing and health check mechanisms.

In summary, while Azure Load Balancer effectively addresses load balancing, it cannot fulfill the needs for rate limiting and comprehensive regional outage handling without additional solutions or