Preparing AZ-104 : Understand Virtual Networks (VNet) – Important concept / feature in AZURE – Simplifying concepts

Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!!

Preparing AZURE – today discussing one of the important concept – Virtual Networks

Take away from this article

• AZURE Network Services
• What is Virtual Network
• Virtual Network Pricing
• Why to use Virtual Network / Scenarios
• Azure services which we can connect to VNet
• Various approaches to create VNet – Microsoft recommendation to create Virtual Networks

AZURE Network Service

• AZURE network service provides various networking components as shown in below fig

What is Virtual Network

• Vnet is a fundamental component, which is acts as an organisation’s network in azure
• An Azure Virtual Network (VNet) is a representation of our own network in the cloud
• Virtual Network allows to communicate our AZURE resources securely such as Virtual Machines (VMs)
• Virtual Networks are similar to our network in our own data center but with additional cloud capabilities such scale, availability and isolation
• This communication can be in between
  • Our Azure Resources
  • Over the Internet
  • and with On-Premises networks

Virtual Network Pricing

• Virtual networks are free of cost
• Every subscription can create up to 50 Virtual Networks across all regions.

Scenarios / Why to use Virtual Network

• Our organization is migrating to AZURE – In tis case we need to replicate our On-Premises network to AZURE
• In AZURE we will do this with the help of Virtual Networks and other components which we will discuss in upcoming articles
• To create dedicated private cloud-only network – We implement Azure Virtual Network to create virtual representation of our organization network in cloud
• Azure Virtual Network can also be used for filtering network traffic, routing network traffic and integration with other Azure services

Some characteristics of Azure Virtual Network

• Azure Virtual Network is dedicated to our subscription
• We can use Virtual networks to manage virtual private networks (VPNs) in Azure
• A VNet is limited to single region
• We can connect VNets in different region with virtual network peering
• VNet spans all availability zones in a region
• All VMs and Cloud services role instances deployed within a VNet can connect to the Internet
• We can not move resources from one VNet to another VNet. To move resource from one VNet to another we need to delete and redeploy the resources
• Virtual Networks dosent store any data

Azure services which we can connect to VNet

Here just listing, detailed articles will be in queue 🙂 Table courtesy from Microsoft

Services that can be deployed into a virtual network

Category	Service	Dedicated1 Subnet
Compute	Virtual machines: Linux or Windows Virtual machine scale sets Cloud Service: Virtual network (classic) only Azure Batch	No No No No2
Network	Application Gateway – WAF Azure Bastion Azure Firewall Azure Route Server ExpressRoute Gateway Network Virtual Appliances VPN Gateway	Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes
Data	RedisCache Azure SQL Managed Instance Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server Azure Database for PostgreSQL – Flexible Server	Yes Yes Yes Yes
Analytics	Azure HDInsight Azure Databricks	No2 No2
Identity	Azure Active Directory Domain Services	No
Containers	Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Azure Container Instance (ACI) Azure Container Service Engine with Azure Virtual Network CNI plug-in Azure Functions	No2 Yes No Yes
Web	API Management Web Apps App Service Environment Azure Logic Apps Azure Container Apps environments	Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Hosted	Azure Dedicated HSM Azure NetApp Files	Yes Yes
Azure Spring Apps	Deploy in Azure virtual network (VNet injection)	Yes
Virtual desktop infrastructure	Azure Lab Services	Yes

Various approaches to create VNet

• Azure Portal
• Azure PowerShell
• Azure CLI
• From network configuration file

Recommendation to create VNets – It is recommended you have fewer large VNets rather than multiple small VNets. This will prevent management overhead.

We will discuss all these approaches in depth in upcoming articles

Thanks for reading !!! ENJOY BEAUTIFUL LIFE 🙂 HAVE A VERY PEACEFUL AND FANTASTIC TIME AHEAD 🙂