Instructor: Hi Gurus.
Welcome to the lesson on Cloud Network Connectivity.
In this lesson, we will explore
how to connect on-premises, networks, other clouds,
and virtual networks within Azure.
We'll also cover IP addressing
and various network topologies.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able
to recommend load balancing and routing solutions
based on your understanding of these concepts.
Azure provides multiple options
for connecting on-premises networks,
other clouds, and virtual networks or VNets within Azure.
The premier connection type is leveraging
a dedicated private networking service called Express Route.
Think of it as a high performance network edge connector
from a private data center to Azure.
Azure VPN Gateway enables secure connections
using site-to-site and point-to-site VPNs.
vNet peering allows you to seamlessly connect vNets
within Azure, even across regions and subscriptions.
These connectivity options provide flexibility
and enable various network architectures.
Let's look at IP addressing.
In Azure or any cloud for that matter,
you'll have all sorts of resources deployed.
Virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters,
databases, storage accounts, code, and more.
In most architectures, these services need to communicate
with one another, sometimes in one direction,
sometimes bidirectionally.
They do this with IP addresses.
There are three layers of IP addressing.
The unseen layer is the internal networking substrate
that exists between Microsoft managed services.
This is seen when you enable one Azure service
to be accessible to another Azure service type.
You are not connecting these services
through traditional networking configurations,
but instead giving Microsoft permission to configure
and administrate that networking for you.
The second is the virtual network.
This is most commonly for explicitly connecting IaaS
and some PaaS services to one another.
Private IP addresses are used within VNets
and can be allocated dynamically or statically.
For external access, the public IP address is used.
Public IP addresses enable external access to resources
and also come in dynamic or static types.
Proper IP address planning ensures
efficient network communication and connectivity.
A public IP address can be used for a multitude of resources
including code execution resources.
Keep in mind that you never want to expose a resource
with a public IP address unless it's absolutely necessary.
Azure supports various network topologies
to meet different requirements.
You have a single network that has various resources
who can talk to one another, subnets and internal security,
obviously, not withstanding.
The single VNet topology is simple and suitable
for small deployments or for testing purposes.
When you have multiple virtual networks,
you have to begin peering these networks together.
Though sometimes necessary.
the risk that comes with this approach
is that sprawl can occur
and create chaos when it comes to network traffic monitoring
and overall security.
An alternative approach
to managing the complexity of multiple networks is
to employ a hub-and-spoke architecture.
In hub-and-spoke rather than individual network peers
being the norm, all networks are peered
with one specific virtual network.
In doing this, the architect now has the ability
to centralize network traffic control
and traffic monitoring outside of the network,
as well as providing a level of centralized
internal and external network security.
Each of these topics will be addressed further
in forthcoming lessons,
but the different approaches to networking shown here are
to remember an important principle
when designing solutions in Azure.
Network topology matters for on-premises, cloud,
and hybrid environments.
Thanks for watching
and I hope to see you in the next lesson.