Azure Networking

Explore the fundamental building blocks and advanced features of Azure networking services.

Overview of Azure Networking

Azure Networking provides a comprehensive suite of services for connecting Azure resources to each other, to the internet, and to your on-premises environments. It is the backbone of your cloud infrastructure, ensuring secure, reliable, and high-performance connectivity.

Key Concepts

  • Virtual Network (VNet): The fundamental building block for your private network in Azure. It allows you to provision and manage a logically isolated section of the Azure cloud.
  • Subnets: VNet is divided into subnets, which are ranges of IP addresses within the VNet.
  • Network Security Groups (NSGs): Act as a virtual firewall for your VNets to control inbound and outbound traffic at the IP packet level.
  • Azure Firewall: A cloud-native, intelligent network firewall as a service that protects your Azure Virtual Network resources.
  • Load Balancer: Distributes network traffic from clients to backend resources, improving application availability and responsiveness.
  • Application Gateway: A web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications.
  • VPN Gateway: Securely connect your on-premises networks to Azure VNets via Site-to-Site VPNs, or connect individual users via Point-to-Site VPNs.
  • ExpressRoute: Provides private, dedicated, and high-throughput connections between your on-premises infrastructure and Microsoft Azure.

Common Use Cases

  • Securing communication between virtual machines.
  • Connecting on-premises data centers to Azure.
  • Distributing traffic to improve application availability and performance.
  • Enforcing network security policies.
  • Creating highly available and scalable web applications.

Getting Started

The best way to understand Azure Networking is to start building. Here are some essential resources:

Example: Creating a Network Security Group Rule

You can define rules to allow or deny traffic to and from your Azure resources. Here's a conceptual example of an inbound rule using Azure CLI:

az network nsg rule create \
    --resource-group MyResourceGroup \
    --nsg-name MyNSG \
    --name AllowSSH \
    --priority 110 \
    --direction Inbound \
    --access Allow \
    --protocol Tcp \
    --src-port-range '*' \
    --dst-port-range 22 \
    --src-address-prefix '*' \
    --dst-address-prefix '*'