For this chapter, you'll need an Azure subscription.

The networking stack in Microsoft Azure is very important and is the foundation for other services, especially when we talk about IaaS. Setting up Azure networking correctly is very important, as it will be key to setting up your IaaS infrastructure and allowing your virtual machines to communicate. The networking stack in Azure is composed of two components, external and private. External is used to access service endpoints over the internet and private is used for communication between Azure services internally.

Almost all Azure services have external endpoints configured by default, but we have some special cases when we don't want to enable access over the internet. In these cases, we can disable external endpoints and set up these services to use private traffic only. This applies to PaaS as well, even though these services usually don't...

We have our VNet configured and ready but we need resources in there to actually start using it. The first step is to add a new Azure virtual machine to our VNet in order to start using the Azure networking stack.

In order to create a new Azure virtual machine through the portal, we have to take three steps. We need to select New resource and select a new virtual machine. We have hundreds of images available and we'll discuss that in chapters to come:

1. In this case, we need a single VM only, to show networking options for it, and we'll set all default parameters in order to get there quickly. I selected the Windows Server 2016 image and started providing the basic...

Once the deployment of the VM is finished, we can see the device in Connected devices under the virtual network blade. An example of what the connected device blade looks like is shown in the following screenshot. Information shown here includes the device name, type of device connected, private IP address, and subnet the device is assigned to. IP address information is related to a private IP address, one that was assigned to our VM on the VNet level and is used only for internal traffic. Note that type of device is Network interface. Every VM has a network interface card (NIC) that is used to communicate with the network and one is automatically created with your VM. A virtual machine can have more than one NIC if you need to connect to multiple subnets or make sure that the VM is available, even when one NIC fails. The number of NICs depends on VM size, it...

We already talked about ARM templates and how they can help us automate things. For this chapter, I created a virtual network and joined one virtual machine to that network.

If you move to automation, you can find an ARM template in JSON format that you can use to redeploy my resources. The ARM template will contain all the resources and all the settings: a virtual network and parameters, a virtual machine with information about the image and size, NSG rules, and so on. It will contain information on all dependencies and information on what needs to be created first. For example, in order to create a VM, a subnet needs to be created in order to join the VM to that subnet, and a subnet can't be created until a VNet is created.

Note that some parameters, such as passwords, are not provided as a password isn't allowed to be shown in clear text, but only...

We covered the basic features of Azure networking with virtual networks, IP address types, and NSGs. This basic knowledge of Azure networking will be the foundation for chapters to come.

It's also very important to understand ARM templates, as they will be very helpful once our infrastructure becomes more complex.

From here, we'll advance to Azure IaaS, which will use Azure networking as the backbone and the service that holds everything together. We'll see how to create advanced VM scenarios that will use Azure networking, private for communication between VMs and public for external access. We'll explain in more detail options for creating new Azure virtual machines, availability groups, and high-availability for IaaS in Azure.

1. Which services are depended on the Azure network in Microsoft Azure?
   1. IaaS
   2. PaaS
   3. Both
2. What defines the IP address range in Azure?
   1. Subnet mask
   2. CIDR
   3. RIP
3. Service endpoints are used to connect which services to your virtual network?
   1. Virtual machines
   2. PaaS
   3. SaaS
4. The default DNS service in Microsoft Azure is...?
   1. Azure DNS
   2. Public DNS
   3. Custom DNS
5. When can service endpoints be added?
   1. When creating a virtual network
   2. After a virtual network is created
   3. At any time
6. Private IP addresses in Azure can be...?
   1. Dynamic
   2. Static
   3. Both
7. Public IP addresses in Azure can be...?
   1. Dynamic
   2. Static
   3. Both
8. NSGs are...?
   1. Security rules that define traffic flow
   2. Rules on IP address reservations
   3. Both

9. What does an NSG define?
   1. Outbound traffic rules
   2. Inbound traffic rules
   3. Both
10. To what can an NSG not be assigned to?
    1. Virtual network
    2. NIC
    3. Subnet