Azure Networking

Private Link is an exciting new service that lets you bring Azure PaaS resources into your virtual network. Find out what it does, how it works and why you want to use it.

It’s often necessary to configure Azure virtual machines to use a consistent outbound IP address, to connect to another resource with an IP based whitelist. In a classic cloud service based deployment this was easy, all of the VM’s in the cloud service used the cloud services IP for outbound traffic and all was well. In an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) deployment things are different. There’s no concept of cloud services and public IP’s are assigned to VM’s or load balencers.

On Tuesday at Ignite Microsoft announced a number of new Azure services, one of which was Azure DNS. The ability to host your DNS zones has been a feature of cloud providers like AWS for some time now, so it’s good to see Microsoft adding in this essential component for providing web services. Before venturing into using Azure DNS there are a few things to be aware of, firstly it’s not (yet) available in the management portal, you can use it via PowerShell, .

Picking the right Azure data centre to host your application in is critical to getting decent levels of latency. In some cases it’s very clear which data centre to use based on your audience location, but what about when things aren’t so clear? If your in Europe, which of the two locations is best? If your in the Middle East, where there are no Azure data centres, how do you find out which is the best to use?