Azure Networking Overview
Welcome to the comprehensive overview of Azure networking services. This section will guide you through the fundamental concepts and core components that enable connectivity, security, and performance for your applications and services hosted on Microsoft Azure.
Why Azure Networking?
Azure provides a robust and scalable global network infrastructure that allows you to:
- Connect Azure resources to each other and to on-premises environments.
- Secure your network traffic and control access to resources.
- Optimize application performance and availability.
- Extend your datacenter to the cloud with hybrid networking solutions.
Core Networking Concepts
Understanding these core concepts is crucial for designing and managing your Azure network:
Virtual Network (VNet)
An Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is the fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. It allows you to provision and manage your own IP address spaces, subnets, route tables, and network gateways. VNets enable isolation and segmentation of resources.
Key features include:
- Private IP address space
- Subnetting for segmentation
- Network Security Groups (NSGs) for traffic filtering
- User Defined Routes (UDRs) for custom routing
Network Security Groups (NSGs)
Network Security Groups act as a distributed firewall that you can associate with subnets or individual network interfaces (NICs) within your VNet. They contain a list of security rules that allow or deny network traffic based on protocol, port, and source/destination IP addresses.
Essential for implementing the principle of least privilege and protecting your resources.
Learn more about Network Security Groups →Load Balancing
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancer that distributes network traffic from consumers to resources. It provides high availability and scalability by distributing connections across healthy instances of your applications.
Azure also offers Application Gateway (Layer 7) and Traffic Manager (DNS-based) for more advanced traffic management scenarios.
Learn more about Load Balancing →VPN Gateway
Azure VPN Gateway enables you to securely connect your on-premises networks to Azure VNets, or connect VNets to each other, using a secure VPN tunnel. This is fundamental for building hybrid cloud solutions.
Supports both Site-to-Site (S2S) and VNet-to-VNet connectivity.
Learn more about VPN Gateway →Azure Firewall
Azure Firewall is a cloud-native network security service that protects your Azure VNet resources. It's a managed, cloud-based network security service that protects your Virtual Network resources. Firewall is a fully stateful and immutable cloud-native network security service with high availability and scalability.
Offers network and application-level filtering, threat intelligence, and more.
Learn more about Azure Firewall →Common Networking Scenarios
Azure networking services are used to implement a wide variety of scenarios, including:
- Hybrid Cloud Connectivity: Connecting your on-premises datacenter to Azure.
- Multi-VNet Communication: Enabling communication between different VNets within Azure.
- Web Application Security: Protecting public-facing web applications with firewalls and load balancers.
- Disaster Recovery: Establishing redundant network paths for business continuity.
- Global Traffic Distribution: Directing users to the nearest or most available application instance.
This overview provides a starting point. Explore the individual service pages for deeper dives into configuration, best practices, and advanced features.