Deploy highly available NVAs
Learn how to deploy network virtual appliances for high availability in Azure. This article includes example architectures for ingress, egress, and both.
Networking on Azure and AWS
Elastic Load Balancing, Azure Load Balancer, and Azure Application Gateway
The Azure equivalents of the two Elastic Load Balancing services are:
Load Balancer: provides the same capabilities as the AWS Classic Load Balancer, allowing you to distribute traffic for multiple VMs at the network level. It also provides failover capability.
Application Gateway: offers application-level rule-based routing comparable to the AWS Application Load Balancer.
Route 53, Azure DNS, and Azure Traffic Manager
In AWS, Route 53 provides both DNS name management and DNS-level traffic routing and failover services. In Azure this is handled through two services:
Azure DNS provides domain and DNS management.
Traffic Manager provides DNS level traffic routing, load balancing, and failover capabilities.
Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute
Azure provides similar site-to-site dedicated connections through its ExpressRoute service. ExpressRoute allows you to connect your local network directly to Azure resources using a dedicated private network connection. Azure also offers more conventional site-to-site VPN connections at a lower cost.
Network service comparison
| Area | AWS service | Azure service | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloud virtual networking | Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) | Virtual Network | Provides an isolated, private environment in the cloud. Users have control over their virtual networking environment, including selection of their own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. |
| Cross-premises connectivity | VPN Gateway | VPN Gateway | Connects Azure virtual networks to other Azure virtual networks, or customer on-premises networks (Site To Site). Allows end users to connect to Azure services through VPN tunneling (Point To Site). |
| DNS management | Route 53 | DNS | Manage your DNS records using the same credentials and billing and support contract as your other Azure services |
| 53 | Traffic Manager | A service that hosts domain names, plus routes users to Internet applications, connects user requests to datacenters, manages traffic to apps, and improves app availability with automatic failover. | |
| Dedicated network | Direct Connect | ExpressRoute | Establishes a dedicated, private network connection from a location to the cloud provider (not over the Internet). |
| Load balancing | Network Load Balancer | Load Balancer | Azure Load Balancer load balances traffic at layer 4 (TCP or UDP). Standard Load Balancer also supports cross-region or global load balancing. |
| Application Load Balancer | Application Gateway | Application Gateway is a layer 7 load balancer. It supports SSL termination, cookie-based session affinity, and round robin for load-balancing traffic. |
Networking architectures
-
-
Hub-spoke network topology in Azure
Learn how to implement a hub-spoke topology in Azure, where the hub is a virtual network and the spokes are virtual networks that peer with the hub.
-
Implement a secure hybrid network
See a secure hybrid network that extends an on-premises network to Azure with a perimeter network between the on-premises network and an Azure virtual network.
