Azure Firewall Features

Azure Firewall is a managed, cloud-native network security service that protects your virtual network resources. It's a fully stateful firewall as a service with built-in high availability and unrestricted cloud scalability.

                Key Benefit: Centralized network traffic inspection and threat protection across your Azure network.
            

Core Features

Network and Application Rules

Control traffic flow to and from Azure resources using FQDN tags, fully qualified domain names (FQDNs), or IP addresses. Application rules allow granular control over web applications.

Threat Intelligence-based Filtering

Automatically block traffic to and from known malicious IP addresses, domains, and URLs identified by Microsoft's threat intelligence feeds.

Centralized Logging and Monitoring

Gain insights into network traffic, firewall rules, and threats through integration with Azure Monitor, Azure Sentinel, and other SIEM/SOAR tools.

High Availability and Scalability

Azure Firewall is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering with built-in redundancy and automatic scaling to meet demand.

SNAT Support

Azure Firewall automatically provides Source Network Address Translation (SNAT) for outbound traffic. You can also configure Destination Network Address Translation (DNAT) to allow inbound traffic to your resources.

Private IP Address Support

Supports both public and private IP addresses for network traffic inspection and policy enforcement.

Advanced Features

Azure Firewall Premium

Offers enhanced features like TLS inspection, Intrusion Detection and Prevention System (IDPS), and Web Filtering for advanced threat protection.

Network Address Translation (NAT)

Flexible NAT capabilities, including DNAT for inbound traffic and SNAT for outbound traffic, configurable through rules.

VNet Peering and VPN/ExpressRoute Integration

Seamlessly integrates with peered VNets and hybrid connectivity options like VPN Gateways and ExpressRoute for comprehensive network security.

Use Cases

Securing hub-and-spoke network architectures.
Protecting workloads deployed in Azure.
Enforcing consistent security policies across multiple VNets.
Filtering outbound internet traffic.
Inspecting inbound traffic to applications.

Getting Started

To deploy Azure Firewall, you can use the Azure portal, Azure CLI, PowerShell, or ARM templates. Ensure you have a virtual network with a dedicated subnet named AzureFirewallSubnet.

# Example using Azure CLI to create a firewall
az network firewall create \
    --name MyFirewall \
    --resource-group MyResourceGroup \
    --location westus2 \
    --vnet-name MyVNet \
    --public-ip-address MyFirewallPublicIP

Refer to the official Azure Firewall documentation for detailed configuration and best practices.