Azure Networking Overview

Microsoft Azure provides a comprehensive suite of networking services designed to enable organizations to build, deploy, and manage applications securely and efficiently in the cloud. Azure networking services offer high availability, scalability, and robust security features.

This overview covers the core components and concepts of Azure networking, helping you understand how to connect your Azure resources to each other, to the internet, and to your on-premises environments.

Key Concepts in Azure Networking

Virtual Networks (VNets)

A Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. It allows you to provision a private space within the Azure cloud where you can launch your Azure resources. VNets enable you to:

• Isolate your cloud resources.
• Define your own private IP address space.
• Segment your network into subnets.
• Control traffic flow within and between subnets.

Subnets

Subnets are divisions of your VNet's IP address space. By dividing your VNet into subnets, you can logically isolate different sets of resources. This isolation can enhance security and manageability, allowing you to apply different network security groups (NSGs) or routing rules to different subnets.

Network Security Groups (NSGs)

Network Security Groups (NSGs) act as a distributed firewall for your virtual network. They enable you to filter network traffic to and from Azure resources in an Azure virtual network. You can define security rules in NSGs to allow or deny inbound and outbound traffic based on source/destination IP address, port, and protocol.

Load Balancing

Azure offers several load-balancing solutions to distribute network traffic and improve the availability and responsiveness of your applications:

• Azure Load Balancer: Operates at Layer 4 (TCP/UDP) and provides high-performance, low-latency load balancing for TCP and UDP applications.
• Azure Application Gateway: A web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. It provides Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS) load balancing, SSL termination, and cookie-based session affinity.
• Azure Traffic Manager: A DNS-based traffic load balancer that allows you to distribute traffic to endpoints in different regions, improving availability and performance.

VPN Gateway and ExpressRoute

These services provide secure and reliable connectivity between your on-premises networks and Azure:

• VPN Gateway: Enables you to send encrypted traffic between your on-premises networks and Azure over the public internet.
• ExpressRoute: Provides private, dedicated, and faster connectivity from your premises to Microsoft Azure. It bypasses the public internet, offering higher reliability, faster speeds, and lower latencies.

Azure Firewall

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources. It's a highly available and scalable cloud-native firewall that provides threat intelligence-based filtering and centralized policy management.

Azure DNS

Azure DNS provides a reliable and secure domain name system (DNS) hosting service for your Azure services. It enables you to resolve hostnames of your Azure services to IP addresses. You can also host your DNS domains in Azure for other resources.

Benefits of Azure Networking

• Scalability: Easily scale your network resources up or down as your needs change.
• High Availability: Design for resilience with features like load balancing and multi-region deployments.
• Security: Protect your resources with a comprehensive set of security services, including firewalls, NSGs, and DDoS protection.
• Hybrid Connectivity: Seamlessly connect your on-premises infrastructure with Azure for hybrid cloud solutions.
• Global Reach: Deploy applications and services across Azure's global network of data centers.

Explore the links in the sidebar to dive deeper into each specific Azure networking service.