Azure networking for humans - Azure Tutorial

Let's talk about networking in Azure and because networking has a tendency to be a little bit of a complicated topic, I'm going to give you an analogy that just kind of works for our human mind. We're going to use a neighborhood as an analogy for these different networking concepts. We're going to start off with a virtual network, which represents the neighborhood itself, the cloud neighborhood. Now this is a gated neighborhood, which means we can control who comes into and out of the neighborhood. Not everyone can get into the neighborhood. It's private, and so things that are happening outside of the neighborhood cannot impact our neighborhood because it's gated. Now the neighborhood itself defines the addresses or how you get to specific places within the neighborhood and that neighborhood can connect to other neighborhoods. So in an Azure virtual network environment, we have a private network that traffic outside the network cannot get in unless we allow it. When we say we define the addresses or how you get to things in the neighborhood, those or IP addresses in the virtual network and you can connect this neighborhood or virtual network to other neighborhoods. Now let's talk about subnets because this is how we organize the neighborhood. The purpose of a subnet is to segment different parts of the neighborhood for different purposes. So you may have some areas of the neighborhood where people live and you have other areas in the neighborhood that are public areas. So you can separate those using subnets or different streets inside the neighborhood. There are also different rules for these different areas. So inside of your area where you have people living, you might have a very low speed limit and different traffic rules than you do in areas that are common areas. And you might have other areas that are just designed to connect these two areas where you have faster speed limits. So there are different rules depending on where you are within that neighborhood. So these different areas are separated from each other. And there are different rules in place to allow you to implement some safety in that environment. By organizing the neighborhood in this way, you have easier management and it's easier to grow. And subnets work the same way in a virtual network. Now let's talk about houses. And in our analogy, houses represent the endpoints or where traffic is going to end up in our network or in our neighborhood. And each of these endpoints has an address. A house in our neighborhood has a street address that allows us to identify exactly where it is. and in a virtual network, we have an IP address. Does the same thing. Also, these endpoints can be private or they can be public. They can be endpoints that are only accessible inside of our network. They can also be public endpoints that are available also to people outside of our network, outside of our neighborhood. We can also secure these. So for example, we have locks and things like that on a house that allows us to control who can come in and when people can come in. Same thing with endpoints in the network. Then in a house, there are different doors for different purposes. You might have the front door where you allow visitors to come into the house. You might have a back door that you use for people that you know really well. Same thing with endpoints. You have different entry points for endpoints depending on what that traffic is designed to do, that allows you to implement security.