Mike: Welcome to Hybrid Network Connectivity.
When it comes to connecting your on-premises data center
to Azure, you have two main options.
VPN and ExpressRoute.
VPN provides a secure encrypted connection
over the public internet.
On the other hand, ExpressRoute
offers a dedicated private connection
with higher bandwidth and lower latency.
When deciding on which one
or both you may need, consider the following.
VPN is suitable for secure remote access for employees,
scenarios with low to moderate bandwidth requirements,
and small to mediums size deployments
for cost effectiveness.
ExpressRoute is ideal
for mission critical applications,
large scale data transfers
and scenarios with regulatory compliance
and data sovereignty requirements.
In some cases, using both VPN
and ExpressRoute together can be beneficial.
VPN, for instance, can serve as a backup
or failover for ExpressRoute,
ensuring continuous connectivity.
Additionally, combining VPN and ExpressRoute
allows you to segregate traffic based on security
and performance needs, routing sensitive data
through ExpressRoute while using VPN
for less critical traffic.
When deploying VPN gateways in Azure, it's important
to choose the right sizing and SKU
based on your throughput and tunnel requirements.
Azure currently offers two generations
of VPN Gateway with the respective SKU offerings.
For Gen One, you have basic VpnGw1,
Gw2, Gw3 and VpnGw1 through 3AZ.
For Gen Two, you have VpnGw2, Gw3, Gw4, Gw5,
and VpnGw2 through 5AZ.
Selecting the appropriate SKU ensures optimal performance
and scalability for your VPN connections,
and also provides cost effectiveness.
To achieve high availability and redundancy,
you can deploy VPN gateways
in an active-active configuration.
This setup allows both instances of the VPN gateway
to be active simultaneously,
providing failover capabilities
and ensuring continuous connectivity.
Azure VPN gateways support both policy-based
and route-based VPNs.
Route-based VPNs sometimes referred
to as dynamic routing, offer more flexibility
with their configuration
and are the most common across most scenarios.
Policy-based VPNs, sometimes referred
to as static routing, have virtual ubiquity,
as it's supported even on most legacy devices.
Additionally, you can leverage dynamic routing
with BGP to exchange routing information
between your on-premises network and Azure,
enabling more advanced routing scenarios.
ExpressRoute Global Reach is a feature that allows you
to connect your on-premises networks through Azure,
enabling communication
between your on-premises locations
using the ExpressRoute network.
This eliminates the need for additional VPN
or leased line connections between your sites,
simplifying network topology and reducing costs
in some cases.
ExpressRoute FastPath is an optimization
that provides an improved data path
for specific workloads.
By bypassing the ExpressRoute gateway,
FastPath reduces latency
and increases throughput,
benefiting scenarios such as storage replication
and high performance computing,
and obviously comes with an additional cost,
so it is something more
for your critical performance applications.
In some cases, you may need to use both VPN
and ExpressRoute together.
Again, this coexistence can be beneficial when migrating
from VPN to ExpressRoute,
allowing you to gradually transition workloads
while maintaining connectivity,
and it can also provide flexibility
in routing traffic based on specific requirements,
such as ExpressRoute for high-bandwidth workloads
and VPN for less demanding traffic.
And again, usually in those together both and scenarios,
it is often a combination of cost effectiveness
and, or security requirements.
Azure Virtual WAN is a simplified networking service
that provides centralized network connectivity
and management for your hybrid cloud environment.
It simplifies the process of connecting branch locations
and on-premises networks
to Azure enabling seamless connectivity
and reducing complexity.
Virtual WAN consists of several key components.
The Virtual WAN Hub acts as a central point
of connectivity providing a scalable
and automated way to connect your networks.
Virtual WAN VPN Gateway
and ExpressRoute Gateway allow you
to establish secure connections using VPN,
and ExpressRoute, respectively.
One of the strengths of Virtual WAN is its integration
with a wide ecosystem of partners
and customer premises equipment or CPE devices.
This integration enables you
to leverage your existing network investments
and simplifies the deployment
and management of hybrid connectivity.
Virtual WAN also provides built-in monitoring
and diagnostic tools to help you monitor
and troubleshoot connectivity issues.
These tools usually offer insights into network performance,
latency and connectivity status,
so that you can proactively identify and resolve problems.
Let's consider a real world scenario.
Weinvest as a global financial services company
with multiple branch offices
and a significant on-premises infrastructure.
They are migrating their applications to Azure
and need to establish secure
and reliable connectivity
between their on-premises data centers and Azure.
Some of the requirements are secure
and high-performance connectivity
for mission-critical financial applications,
the ability to connect branch offices
and remote users to Azure resources,
compliance with regulatory requirements
for data protection and privacy
and scalability to accommodate future growth and expansion.
For our solution, we would implement ExpressRoute
for dedicated high-bandwidth connectivity
between on-premises data centers and Azure.
Use Virtual WAN to connect branch offices
and remote users to Azure,
leveraging the virtual WAN hub and VPN gateway.
Establish VPN connections as a backup
and failover mechanism for ExpressRoute.
Leverage ExpressRoute Global Reach to enable communication
between on-premises locations through Azure,
and implement network security best practices,
such as Azure Firewall, Network Virtual Appliances,
and secure hybrid connectivity.
This is just an example of how you can take a scenario
and how a company might use some of,
or all of the technologies discussed here
to create a cloud solution that best suits their needs.
Thanks so much for being here,
and I'll see you in the next lesson.