DescriptionWhat is the FortiDirector?
FortiDirector™ is the first CDN & Cloud Load Balancer as a Service, providing IaaS load-balancing capabilities. This means that you do not need to install any software or hardware in your facilities in order to use it, thus cutting Capex and Opex for your organization.
The FortiDirector platform offers two types of load balancing: HTTP and DNS and provides redirection at the following layers:
Layer 3 - DNS Redirection
Layer 4 - Simple HTTP Redirection
Layer 7 - Advanced HTTP Redirection
FortiDirector provides solutions for various network and business continuity challenges, including:
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning with health-checking and active/passive and active/active failover.
A/B Testing and Performance testing
Anycast GSLB load balancing among your resources to increase your network’s efficiency and lower your Capex and Opex by choosing the right infrastructure providers for the right task
Performance or reliability issues related to the geographic distribution of your users
Revenue loss due to service or network outages, whether complete or partial
How does the FortiDirector work? The overview...
FortiDirector is a global platform that takes inbound queries, processes them according to user created rules and conditions, and responds to these queries with a DNS response or an HTTP 302 redirect response.
As a FortiDirector service administrator, you configure two key types of objects:
Network Resources:
Network resources are hostnames or IP addresses capable of servicing the inbound requests, and are the destinations to which FortiDirector will redirect inbound requests. Network Resources can be single servers, VIPs (Virtual IPs), Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), cloud servers, etc. Network Resources are applied in FortiDirector Rulesets as outputs to the load balancing decision.
Rulesets:
Rulesets are logical groupings of rules, which contain conditions that indicate where the inbound request should be routed. Incoming requests towards the inbound hostname are processed against the rules database of the redirector and answered conditionally based on context parameters and user input logic. When creating a Ruleset, you will need to provide a hostname configured on your DNS to point to FortiDirector. This process is explained in more detail later in this document.
FortiDirector uses the inbound request to identify the Ruleset that will apply to the traffic, and then compares the parameters and conditions and context of the request against the Rules therein to generate a valid response to the end-user.
How are clients routed to the Redirectors?
Clients are routed to our redirectors using BGP anycast, which guarantees that clients connect to the redirector closest to them on the network. For DNS clients, clients must create an NS record for their rulesets within their own DNS records to point to our BGP anycast VIP(s), and then clients will know to talk to the XDN redirector cloud and BGP anycast will guarantee they talk to the best one for them.
Documentation
The User Guide and API documentation can be downloaded from http://docs.fortinet.com/fdirector.
Video: How to set up FortiDirector
