Microsoft Azure Networking

This section introduces Azure API and CLI, high-level constructs like geographies, regions and availability zones, provides an overview of networking elements and high-availability mechanisms and describes resource manager and resource groups.

In this section you'll learn about Azure virtual networks and subnets, VM interfaces, private and public IP addresses, and DNS and DHCP services.

Azure offers numerous network security mechanisms. This section covers intra-VNet mechanisms including:

• Network Security Groups;
• Application Security Groups;
• Packet capture and flow logging;
• Monitoring tools like IP Flow Verify.

Azure Firewall is described in a separate section.

Each subnet in Azure Virtual Network can have a custom route table. This section describes:

• System (default) routes always present in virtual networks;
• Route import from BGP sessions between VNG and customer routers;
• User-defined static routes.

The examples cover a range of scenarios, from simple private subnet with no Internet access to complex service insertion.

Internet access is built into Azure VNet service, and a default route is part of the default routing table. This short section explains the remaining NAT intricacies.

Azure Virtual Networks could be connected to global Internet, to other virtual networks, or to remote sites using IPsec tunnels (VPNs) or direct connections (ExpressRoute).

This section describes Azure external connectivity options, and the concept of Virtual Network Gateways used to implement VPN and ExpressRoute connections.

Azure Virtual WAN is Microsoft's attempt at building an SD-WAN service; Virtual Hubs are the transit virtual routers within Virtual WAN.

This section describes the basics of Virtual WAN and Virtual Hubs, dives deep into Virtual Hub routing, including multiple route tables and transit routing. It also explores various connectivity scenarios, from simple any-to-any connectivity to hub-and-spoke connectivity including networking appliances and Azure Virtual Firewall.

Azure provides numerous TCP/UDP and HTTP load balancing services, including Azure Load Balancer, Azure Application Gateway, and Azure Front Door. You can also use DNS-based load balancing with Azure Traffic Manager, or HTTP caching with Azure CDN. All these services are described in this section.

Azure Firewall is a scale-out stateful L3-L7 firewall that can be used to filter Internet traffic, inter-VNet traffic, or even traffic between on-premises and Azure hosts.

It's a pleasure to work with Azure API: objects have names, you can refer to them by names, and the API uses create-or-update approach, making automation scripts or playbooks extremely easy to develop or understand.

This section explains the principles of Azure API, and describes how to use bash scripts, Ansible playbooks, Terraform configuration files, and Resource Manager Tempaltes to create, update, or delete networking- and compute infrastructure.