Getting Familiar with Azure Virtual Networks

In this chapter, we will introduce Azure Virtual Networks, alongside a number of the Azure networking services that are commonly used. You will learn how to work with Azure Virtual Networks, subnets, public IP addresses, network security groups, service endpoints, and much more.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• An introduction to Azure Virtual Networks
• Azure VNet related services
• Azure service endpoints

An introduction to Azure Virtual Networks

When the computer revolution took place, networks were a very important piece of the puzzle, letting computers communicate with each other.

Throughout the IT revolution, networks have been an indispensable part of every IT environment. It is no surprise that networking is a vital part of the cloud, for many reasons—from remote connections to your Azure VMs, to spanning your environment across on-premises networks and Azure. Networks are used with almost all Azure services, including (but not limited to) Azure VMs, Azure SQL Databases, Azure Web Apps, and so on.

What is Azure VNet?

Azure Virtual Networks (VNets) is one of the most commonly used Microsoft Azure networking services...

Azure VNet related services

There are many Azure networking services related to Azure VNets, such as public IPs, network interface cards (NICs), and so on. In this section, we will look into each of these services.

Public IPs

When you get familiar with Azure services, you will note that there are many Azure services that require public IPs, such as Azure VMs, Azure SQL servers, Azure load balancers, and much more. Fortunately, Microsoft provides public IPs that can be used.

For a while you got to create every public IP address without knowing which IP address would be assigned to you, but Azure recently released a new service, called public IP prefixes, that helps you to create a set of public IPs that are reserved for you...

Summary

So far, we have covered the most commonly used Azure networking services, such as Azure VNets, subnets, NSGs, NICs, service endpoints, and so on. These services are the core services of Azure networking. Therefore, you will need this knowledge in the coming chapter, in order to get a full picture of how Azure services work with each other.

In the next chapter, we will cover Azure VMs. You will learn how to create and manage VMs in Azure. To do so, you will need the knowledge that you have gained from the previous chapters.

Questions

1. You can create a VNet with zero subnets. (True | False)
2. You can create only one gateway subnet per VNet. (True | False)
3. The public IP address can operate as IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time. (True | False)
4. For each subnet that you create, there are five reserved IP addresses. (True | False)

Further reading

• Securing Azure VNets (https://hub.packtpub.com/secure-azure-virtual-network/)
• Hands-On Networking with Azure (https://www.packtpub.com/virtualization-and-cloud/hands-networking-azure)
• Configure Azure Storage Firewalls and Virtual Networks (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-network-security)
• What is Azure Firewall? (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/overview)
• Azure DDoS Protection Standard overview (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ddos-protection-overview)