Understand Azure networking components - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] When talking about networking, there are specific terms that come to mind that relate to both networking in Azure and networking in general. In networking, we talk about security, accessibility, reliability and performance. We want access to our networks to be secure. We want them to be reliable. We want them to have a higher level of reliability in the event of failure. We like them to be very quick in terms of access as well through a high level of performance and a high amount of bandwidth is usually the way that we measure performance in networking. The amount of bandwidth that we have accessible or the available bandwidth for a connection. When talking about Azure networking, we have specific groupings of networking products that allow us to achieve these goals of security, reliability and performance. So let's take a look at those various buckets, and here on the Microsoft website for Azure, these are grouped in a very logical way. One of those is providing access, in a performant access specifically. Here, we're talking about Azure ExpressRoute, one of the most costly services in Azure, but one of those that provides the most predictable amount of performance when talking about connectivity and bandwidth, and Azure ExpressRoute is something that requires a high level of experience and understanding of your network infrastructure in order to connect. As well, we'll talk about the Azure Peering Service, which allows us to peer various connections and connect essentially connections together. So these services are example of services that we implement to achieve that high level of performance Security is built into every component. However, security in itself is a separate bucket when looking at services in Azure. One of those that comes to mind is the Azure web application firewall or tool that we use to specifically publish our web apps. Using a firewall, which is a term that most administrators are familiar with, we use a web application firewall service or a specific service dedicated to secure access to our web applications. Now we also have the Azure DDoS protection to prevent DDoS attacks. We also have an Azure Private Link resource that can be created, which will give you a dedicated connection to Azure or private connection to Azure. Those are example of providing a high level of security when that is a primary goal for your organization. We have also tools that provide connectivity in a hybrid environment. If we have an organization that has connectivity requirements from resources that are on-premises and resources that are in the cloud, that's refined and determined as a hybrid environment. Hybrid environments are achieved by deploying all different types of resources, but an example of those is the Azure Virtual WAN. Again, a service that will allow us to connect networks together over a WAN. A very common term in networking in Azure these days is networking as a service or providing this ubiquitous approach to networking by specifically virtualizing specific network components, and we achieve that networking as a service solution by using a number of various services in Azure, such as the Azure Front Door Service that will actually work with a number of other services in order to provide a solid networking solution, as well as the Azure Firewall that you will use to provide firewall services. Some of these functionalities and services exist in regular versions and in premium versions. At the moment of recording this course, Azure Firewall is available as well in premium version and in standard version. The premium version is currently only available in preview and the number of services in Azure are available in preview these days, but it basically means that you can purchase it, but your, some of your support will be a little bit limited, and Microsoft's recommendation for using it in production environment is also very specified here where Microsoft recommends not to use it in production environment. So we have a number of scenarios under which we will implement networking components in Azure. Again, some of these terminology and components will relate back to how you use networking on an on-premises network. Remember that networking in Azure is really just a virtualized version of what you would do in an on-premises network.