Overview
Over the past decade, Azure Networking has expanded rapidly, bringing incredible tools and capabilities to help customers build, connect, and secure their cloud infrastructure. But we've also heard strong feedback: with over 40 different products, it hasn't always been easy to navigate and find the right solution. The complexity often led to confusion, slower onboarding, and missed capabilities.
That's why we're excited to introduce a more focused, streamlined, and intuitive experience across Azure.com, the Azure portal, and our documentation pivoting around four core networking scenarios:
- Network foundations: Network foundations provide the core connectivity for your resources, using Virtual Network, Private Link, and DNS to build the foundation for your Azure network. Try it with this link: Network foundations
- Hybrid connectivity: Hybrid connectivity securely connects on-premises, private, and public cloud environments, enabling seamless integration, global availability, and end-to-end visibility, presenting major opportunities as organizations advance their cloud transformation. Try it with this link: Hybrid connectivity
- Load balancing and content delivery: Load balancing and content delivery helps you choose the right option to ensure your applications are fast, reliable, and tailored to your business needs. Try it with this link: Load balancing and content delivery
- Network security: Securing your environment is just as essential as building and connecting it. The Network Security hub brings together Azure Firewall, DDoS Protection, and Web Application Firewall (WAF) to provide a centralized, unified approach to cloud protection. With unified controls, it helps you manage security more efficiently and strengthen your security posture. Try it with this link: Network security
This new structure makes it easier to discover the right networking services and get started with just a few clicks so you can focus more on building, and less on searching.
What you’ll notice:
- Clearer starting points: Azure Networking is now organized around four core scenarios and twelve essential services, reflecting the most common customer needs. Additional services are presented within the context of these scenarios, helping you stay focused and find the right solution without feeling overwhelmed.
- Simplified choices: We’ve merged overlapping or closely related services to reduce redundancy. That means fewer, more meaningful options that are easier to evaluate and act on.
- Sunsetting outdated services: To reduce clutter and improve clarity, we’re sunsetting underused offerings such as white-label CDN services and China CDN. These capabilities have been rolled into newer, more robust services, so you can focus on what’s current and supported.
What this means for you
- Faster decision-making: With clearer guidance and fewer overlapping products, it's easier to discover what you need and move forward confidently.
- More productive sales conversations: With this simplified approach, you’ll get more focused recommendations and less confusion among sellers.
- Better product experience: This update makes the Azure Networking portfolio more cohesive and consistent, helping you get started quickly, stay aligned with best practices, and unlock more value from day one.
The portfolio consolidation initiative is a strategic effort to simplify and enhance the Azure Networking portfolio, ensuring better alignment with customer needs and industry best practices. By focusing on top-line services, combining related products, and retiring outdated offerings, Azure Networking aims to provide a more cohesive and efficient product experience.
Azure.com
Before: Our original Solution page on Azure.com was disorganized and static, displaying a small portion of services in no discernable order.
After: The revised solution page is now dynamic, allowing customers to click deeper into each networking and network security category, displaying the top line services, simplifying the customer experience.
Azure Portal
Before: With over 40 networking services available, we know it can feel overwhelming to figure out what’s right for you and where to get started.
After: To make it easier, we've introduced four streamlined networking hubs each built around a specific scenario to help you quickly identify the services that match your needs. Each offers an overview to set the stage, key services to help you get started, guidance to support decision-making, and a streamlined left-hand navigation for easy access to all services and features.
Documentation
For documentation, we looked at our current assets as well as created new assets that aligned with the changes in the portal experience. Like Azure.com, we found the old experiences were disorganized and not well aligned. We updated our assets to focus on our top-line networking services, and to call out the pillars. Our belief is these changes will allow our customers to more easily find the relevant and important information they need for their Azure infrastructure.
Azure Network Hub
Before the updates, we had a hub page organized around different categories and not well laid out. In the updated hub page, we provided relevant links for top-line services within all of the Azure networking scenarios, as well as a section linking to each scenario's hub page.
Scenario Hub pages
We added scenario hub pages for each of the scenarios. This provides our customers with a central hub for information about the top-line services for each scenario and how to get started. Also, we included common scenarios and use cases for each scenario, along with references for deeper learning across the Azure Architecture Center, Well Architected Framework, and Cloud Adoption Framework libraries.
Scenario Overview articles
We created new overview articles for each scenario. These articles were designed to provide customers with an introduction to the services included in each scenario, guidance on choosing the right solutions, and an introduction to the new portal experience.
Here's the Load balancing and content delivery overview:
Documentation links
- Azure Networking hub page:
- Azure networking documentation | Microsoft Learn
- Scenario Hub pages:
- Azure load balancing and content delivery | Microsoft Learn
- Azure network foundation documentation | Microsoft Learn
- Azure hybrid connectivity documentation | Microsoft Learn
- Azure network security documentation | Microsoft Learn
- Scenario Overview pages
Improving user experience is a journey and in coming months we plan to do more on this. Watch out for more blogs over the next few months for further improvements.
Microsoft