Welcome to part 1 of this month’s Azure Partner Community blog series.
- Register for the September 17 community call
- Sign up for the Azure Partner email newsletter
- Join the Azure Partners group on Yammer
 | by Nick Johnson, PMP US Partner Technology Strategist |
One of the things I love about Microsoft Azure is that it is always changing. New features are being added and existing ones are being improved. This continuous cycle of growth enables Microsoft partners to build solutions on the latest cloud innovations without waiting months or years for a major product release.
Networking on Azure is an area that has seen some excellent improvements and additions this year. It is also an area that you in the community told us you’d like to spend more time on, so this month we’re excited to do just that.
Earlier this year I published a post about Networking on Azure. At the time, the major design considerations when working with Networking were connecting your on-premises network with your virtual ones in Azure. Everything in that post still applies, and you can read it here.
Over the last few months, the networking options have grown beyond just the connectivity I talked about. As a partner, when you are building solutions on Azure it is still very important to consider networking very early in the planning and design phases. Knowing the available features will help you build a robust solution that is flexible, reliable, and able to grow with the business. Proper design will also save you from potential re-work.
When designing a solution on Azure, consider these questions:
- Will your solution need to connect to other networks?
- What method of connection will you use?
- How many virtual networks will you need in Azure?
- In your virtual networks what will your subnet design and IP address ranges be?
- Will you need reserved public IP addresses?
- Do you need to control the routing of packets?
- Do you need DNS resolution?
- Will your solution grow to include more services in the future?
- Will your solution include Domain Controllers?
- Are you planning to deliver content like pictures or media via Azure?
While the above is not exhaustive, it’s a good starting point, and gives you a sense of what to consider when building a solution on Azure.
The following services and features should be considered in the design process. I encourage you to spend some time getting to know these. There is also a very good Virtual Network FAQ that I often refer to when discussing networking with partners.
| Virtual Networking | Provision private networks, optionally connect to on-premises datacenters | |
| Express Route | Dedicated private network fiber connections to Azure | |
| Traffic Manager | Route incoming traffic for high performance and availability | |
| Load Balancer | Deliver high availability and network performance to your applications | |
| DNS | Host your DNS domain in Azure | |
| VPN Gateway | Establish secure, cross-premises connectivity | |
| Application Gateway | Highly scalable websites with HTTP load balancing and delivery control | |
| Azure Content Delivery Network | Improve the performance of your website, media, or mobile service by moving content closer to your end users | |
| User Defined Routing | Control the routing of packets through a virtual appliance |
In this month’s Azure Partner Community blog series, we are going to look at a few of the features I listed above. Upcoming posts will focus on ExpressRoute, User Defined Routing, and Content Delivery Networks. We will explain how these services work, and what your opportunity as a partner is for leveraging and monetizing the services. Don’t forget to join us on our next community call, on Thursday, September 17. You can register here.
Read the August blog series:
Comments about this post, or questions about the topic? Let us know in the Azure Partners Yammer group.
