Understanding Private Link Service Endpoints

Azure Private Link allows you to access Azure PaaS Services (like Azure Storage and Azure SQL Database) and Azure hosted customer-owned services or partner services over a private endpoint in your virtual network. This is achieved by bringing the service closer to your virtual network, making it more secure and performant.

What is a Private Endpoint?

A private endpoint is a network interface that connects privately and securely to a service powered by Azure Private Link. It uses a private IP address from your virtual network, effectively bringing the service into your network. Traffic between your virtual network and the service travels over the Microsoft backbone network, eliminating exposure to the public internet.

How Private Link Service Endpoints Work

When you create a private endpoint for a service, you are essentially creating a new network interface within your virtual network. This interface is assigned a private IP address. All traffic destined for the service from your virtual network will be routed to this private IP address. The Azure Private Link service then securely routes this traffic to the target service, ensuring that the data never leaves the Microsoft network.

Key Benefits

Enhanced Security: Eliminates public internet exposure for services. Data travels over the Microsoft backbone.
Simplified Network Architecture: Reduces the need for complex VNet peering or VPNs for accessing PaaS services.
Consistent Network Experience: Access Azure PaaS services and your own services with private IP addresses within your VNet.
Compliance: Helps meet regulatory and compliance requirements for data privacy.

Important: Private Link service endpoints are distinct from Private Link, which is the overarching service. A private endpoint is the resource you create within your VNet to connect to a Private Link enabled service.

Use Cases

Accessing Azure Storage accounts privately.
Connecting to Azure SQL Database without public IP exposure.
Enabling secure access to your own SaaS applications hosted on Azure.
Providing secure access to partner services.

Creating a Private Endpoint

You can create a private endpoint through the Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, or ARM templates. The process typically involves:

Selecting the subscription, resource group, region, and name for your private endpoint.
Specifying the target sub-resource (e.g., blob for Azure Blob Storage).
Choosing the virtual network and subnet where the private endpoint will reside.
Configuring private DNS integration for seamless name resolution.

For detailed instructions, please refer to the official Azure documentation on Private Link.

Example Scenario

Imagine you have a web application running in an Azure Virtual Network that needs to access data stored in an Azure Storage account. By creating a private endpoint for the storage account within your VNet, your web application can communicate with the storage account using its private IP address, bypassing the public endpoint and enhancing security.

Example using Azure CLI:


az network private-endpoint create \
  --name myPrivateEndpoint \
  --resource-group myResourceGroup \
  --vnet-name myVNet \
  --subnet mySubnet \
  --private-connection-resource-id "/subscriptions/your-subscription-id/resourceGroups/your-resource-group/providers/Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/yourstorageaccount" \
  --group-ids "blob" \
  --location westus2