Introducing Copilot in Azure for Networking: Your AI-Powered Azure Networking Assistant
As cloud networking grows in complexity, managing and operating these services efficiently can be tedious and time consuming. That’s where Copilot in Azure for Networking steps in, a generative AI tool that simplifies every aspect of network management, making it easier for network administrators to stay on top of their Azure infrastructure. With Copilot, network professionals can design, deploy, and troubleshoot Azure Networking services using a streamlined, AI-powered approach. A Comprehensive Networking Assistant for Azure We’ve designed Copilot to really feel like an intuitive assistant you can talk to just like a colleague. Copilot understands networking-related questions in simple terms and responds with actionable solutions, drawing from Microsoft’s expansive networking knowledge base and the specifics of your unique Azure environment. Think of Copilot as an all-encompassing AI-Powered Azure Networking Assistant. It acts as: Your Cloud Networking Specialist by quickly answering questions about Azure networking services, providing product guidance, and configuration suggestions. Your Cloud Network Architect by helping you select the right network services, architectures, and patterns to connect, secure, and scale your workloads in Azure. Your Cloud Network Engineer by helping you diagnose and troubleshoot network connectivity issues with step-by-step guidance. One of the most powerful features of Copilot in Azure is its ability to automatically diagnose common networking issues. Misconfigurations, connectivity failures, or degraded performance? Copilot can help with step-by-step guidance to resolve these issues quickly with minimal input and assistance from the user, simply ask questions like ”Why can’t my VM connect to the internet?”. As seen above, upon the user identifying the source and destination, Copilot can automatically discover the connectivity path and analyze the state and status of all the network elements in the path to pinpoint issues such as blocked ports, unhealthy network devices, or misconfigured Network Security Groups (NSGs). Technical Deep Dive: Contextualized Responses with Real-Time Insights When users ask a question on the Azure Portal, it gets sent to the Orchestrator. This step is crucial to generating a deep semantic understanding of the user’s question, reasoning over all Azure resources, and then determining that the question requires Network-specific capabilities to be answered. Copilot then collects contextual information based on what the user is looking at and what they have access to before dispatching the question to the relevant domain-specific plugins. Those plugins then use their service-specific capabilities to answer the user’s question. Copilot may even combine information from multiple plugins to provide responses to complex questions. In the case of questions relevant to Azure Networking services, Copilot uses real-time data from sources like diagnostic APIs, user logs, Azure metrics, Azure Resource Graph etc. all while maintaining complete privacy and security and only accessing what the user can access as defined in Azure Role based Access Control (RBAC) to help generate data-driven insights that help keep your network operating smoothly and securely. This information is then used by Copilot to help answer the user’s question via a variety of techniques including but not limited to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and grounding. To learn more about how Copilot works, including our Responsible AI commitments, see Copilot in Azure Technical Deep Dive | Microsoft Community Hub. Summary: Key Benefits, Capabilities and Sample Prompts Copilot boosts efficiency by automating routine tasks and offering targeted answers, which saves network administrators time while troubleshooting, configuring and architecting their environments. Copilot also helps organizations reduce costs by minimizing manual work and catching errors while empowering customers to resolve networking issues on their own with AI-powered insights backed by Azure expertise. Copilot is equipped with powerful skills to assist users with network product information and selection, resource inventory and topology, and troubleshooting. For product information, Copilot can answer questions about Azure Networking products by leveraging published documentation, helping users with questions like “What type of Firewall is best suited for my environment?”. It offers tailored guidance for selecting and planning network architectures, including specific services like Azure Load Balancer and Azure Firewall. This guidance also extends to resilience-related questions like “What more can I do to ensure my app gateway is resilient?” involving services such as Azure Application Gateway and Azure Traffic Manager, among others. When it comes to inventory and topology, Copilot can help with questions like “What is the data path between my VM and the internet?” by mapping network resources, visualizing topologies, and tracking traffic paths, providing users with clear topology maps and connectivity graphs. For troubleshooting questions like “Why can’t I connect to my VM from on prem?”, Copilot analyzes both the control plane and data plane, offering diagnostics at the network and individual service levels. By using on-behalf-of RBAC, Copilot maintains secure, authorized access, ensuring users interact only with resources permitted by their access level. Looking Forward: Future Enhancements This is only the first step we are taking toward bringing interactive, generative-AI powered capabilities to Azure Networking services and as it evolves over time, future releases will introduce advanced capabilities. We also acknowledge that today Copilot in preview works better with certain Azure Networking services, and we will continue to onboard more services to the capabilities we are launching today. Some of the more advanced capabilities we are working on include predictive troubleshooting where Copilot will anticipate potential issues before they impact network performance. Network optimization capabilities that suggest ways to optimize your network for better performance, resilience and reliability alongside enhanced security capabilities providing insights into network security and compliance, helping organizations meet regulatory requirements starting with the integration of Security Copilot attack investigation capabilities for Azure Firewall. Conclusion Copilot in Azure for Networking is intended to enhance the overall Azure experience and help network administrators easily manage their Azure Networking services. By combining AI-driven insights with user-friendly interfaces, it empowers networking professionals and users to plan, deploy, and operate their Azure Network. These capabilities are now in preview, see Azure networking capabilities using Microsoft Copilot in Azure (preview) | Microsoft Learn to learn more and get started.
How to build highly resilient applications with Azure Load Balancer
As customers move workloads to the cloud, designing their applications for high resiliency becomes a key consideration. This blog will highlight how Azure Load Balancer enables highly resilient applications across multiple resiliency categories. How to approach resiliency with Azure Load Balancer? When it comes to designing highly resilient applications, there are multiple types of design patterns that should be considered. Zone-redundancy Customers want to ensure that their deployments in an Azure region are resilient to any data center failures. Azure provides within-region resiliency via Azure Availability Zones. Availability Zones are separated groups of datacenters within a region. Customers can deploy their applications and Azure Load Balancer in a zone-redundant deployment method. A zone-redundant load balancer is replicated across all available zones. If one of the zones fails, then all incoming traffic will be sent to the other two zones, ensuring high availability. Global resiliency For mission critical applications or applications that need a global presence, replicating them across multiple Azure regions will ensure the application is globally resilient. This design pattern will ensure that no single region or geography becomes a single point of failure. In case a region goes offline, traffic will failover to the next available region, ensuring high availability of the application. Azure global Load Balancer can then be used to distribute traffic to these multi-region applications. Azure global Load Balancer is a globally distributed layer-4 load balancing solution. Global load balancer provides features such as a globally static IP address, geo-proximity routing, and automatic failover to the next available region. Subscription resiliency The last two categories of resiliency focused on ensuring the infrastructure itself is resilient. A third bucket focuses on resource management and isolation. Deploying resources and applications into multiple subscriptions can ensure that they are resilient to any subscription-level events. For example, if someone accidentally deletes a subscription or changes permissions, the overall application will still be available due to the replicated instances in the other subscriptions. To support multi-subscription workloads, Azure now supports cross-subscription load balancing. Now, the load balancer’s frontend IP address or backend pool can be located in a subscription that is different than the load balancer. An example of a real world customer To better understand how all the categories of resiliency can be combined, let’s explore an example customer scenario. In this scenario, we will walk through the customer’s use-case and how Azure Load Balancer helped them deploy a highly resilient application. Who is the customer? In this scenario we will be learning about an example customer called Contoso. Contoso is a large retail company based in Europe, and they have a global presence. Contoso is moving off their on-prem environment and onto Azure to support their high-scale needs. What are the application requirements? As the team at Contoso is looking at moving their application to the cloud, they have strict requirements around resiliency that need to be addressed. As mentioned above, Contoso has a global presence and most of their applications need to be globally available. With that, Contoso will deploy replicas of an application across multiple Azure regions to ensure high-availability and resiliency for their global user base. Second, given the criticality of some applications (e.g., inventory manager), these applications need to be deployed in a redundant manner. As mentioned earlier, these applications will be replicated across multiple Azure regions, but Contoso needs these applications to also be replicated within a single Azure region. Third, each application deployment should be isolated from each other, and shouldn’t share a single resource (virtual machine, IP address, etc.). This requirement also extends to subscriptions, where each application replica will be isolated in its own subscription. In addition to the requirements outlined above, Contoso decided that Azure Load Balancer would be a perfect fit for their ingress needs, given its ultra-low latency capabilities. However, Contoso wanted to ensure that Azure Load Balancer would be able to meet their strict resiliency requirements. How did Azure Load Balancer help? To address Contoso’s resiliency requirements, they deployed Azure Load Balancer in a multi-tier architecture. To support their multi-region requirement, an Azure global load balancer was deployed. The global load balancer would then be the gateway into the overall application. Whenever traffic would be sent to the global endpoint, Azure would route it to the closest deployment to that user. In addition, global load balancer’s automatic health probes and failover capabilities gave Contoso peace of mind, knowing that in the off chance of a regional failure, traffic would be automatically routed to the other geos. To support their in-region redundancy requirements, Contoso adopted a zone-redundant architecture for all of their in-region infrastructure (virtual machines, IP addresses, load balancers, etc.). Finally, Contoso adopted the new cross-subscription load balancing feature. With this feature, Contoso can deploy each application replica in its own subscription and then link them to their Azure global Load Balancer. This allows each deployment to be independent and avoid a common failure point. Contoso, after adopting Azure Load Balancer, has developed an architecture that addresses resiliency across the stack. Furthermore, Contoso’s application is now resilient globally, regionally, and at the subscription layer. Learn more Azure global Load Balancer Azure cross-subscription Load Balancer Zone-redundancy with Azure Load Balancer
App Connectivity issue
I have come across an issue being reported by one of the user stating that he is unable to connect to an application on port 5672 hosted behind azure internal load balancer. on my observation from Azure portal post login i see thatAzure front end load balancer is marking the front end port as unresponsive/down for service 5672, while the back end port 2009 on azure internal load balancer is seen up on the back end pool virtual F5 .port mapping done properly on azure Error as seen on Azure is “TCP probe out, unhealthy backend instances or unhealthy app listening on port” However when I check on the Virtual F5 the backend server is responding on port 5672 normally, the health checks look ok, thereby the vip is marked as up. is this abnormal behaviour on the application side against 5672 service or something more to check on the azure side which is resulting to TCP probe out error.. pls suggest
Troubleshoot health probe failures with Azure Load Balancer Health Status
In today's fast-paced cloud computing environment, maintaining the optimal performance and reliability of your applications is crucial. Azure Load Balancer's Health Status feature, now generally available to customers, significantly simplifies this task by providing detailed health information about your backend instances without the need to file a support ticket. This tool offers invaluable insights into the health state of each backend instance and the specific reasons behind their status, whether user-triggered or platform-triggered. By leveraging this feature, customers can proactively address issues, ensure minimal downtime, and enhance the overall user experience, all while reducing reliance on support services. What is Health Status? Health Status is an Azure Load Balancer feature that gives you detailed health information about the backend instances connected to your Azure Load Balancer’s backend pool. Each status is linked to your load balancing rules and provides two key insights: the health state of each backend instance and the reasoning behind its state. The health state indicates whether your backend instance is healthy ("Up") or unhealthy ("Down"). The reasoning behind these states is explained through reason codes, which fall into two categories: User Triggered Reason Codes and Platform Triggered Reason Codes. User Triggered Reason Codes are based on how you configured your load balancer setup and can be addressed by you. Platform Triggered Reason Codes are based on the Azure Load Balancer platform and cannot be addressed by you. For more information about the different reason codes, view our public documentation. Why use Health Status? In the past, customers were not provided with insights into why their backend instances were deemed healthy or unhealthy. To access this crucial information, customers often had to follow troubleshooting procedures such as taking packet captures or going through the process of creating a support ticket, relying on support engineers to identify the cause of a failed health probe. This process was not only complex and time-consuming but also incurred additional costs and added significant management overhead. Now, with the Health Status feature, customers can easily access real-time health information of their backend instances. This empowers them to make swift and informed decisions, minimizing downtime, reducing support costs, and enhancing the overall user experience. By leveraging these insights, customers can proactively manage their environment and ensure optimal performance. Retrieving Health Status Health Status can be easily retrieved on a per load balancing rule basis. To retrieve Health Status: Sign in to the Azure Portal and search for "Load balancers". Select your load balancer and navigate to "Load balancing rules" under Settings. View the health status of the rule by clicking “View details” value of the corresponding rule. Refresh button can be used to get the latest status. Figure 1: Sample Health Status in Azure Portal Contoso's Utilization of Health Status for Game Server Maintenance Let’s explore how one of our customers, Contoso, uses the Health Status feature for efficient decision-making and troubleshooting. Who is Contoso and what is their issue Contoso, a prominent name in the gaming industry, has been leveraging Azure Load Balancer to distribute traffic to their highly popular game server hosted on Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Their users love using Contoso’s servers due to the reliability and performance achieved on them. Recently, Contoso encountered an issue where one of their game servers became unhealthy, leading to disruptions in the gaming experience for their users. How Health Status resolved their issue Thanks to the Azure Load Balancer Health Status feature, the Contoso team was able to quickly navigate to the Load balancing rule page in Portal to view the health status of the unhealthy virtual machine instance. By doing so, they retrieved detailed insights into why their game server was marked unhealthy. This real-time information highlighted “the backend instance was unhealthy due to Admin State set to Down”. Armed with this crucial data, Contoso's Network team swiftly addressed the configuration issue by toggling the Admin State value of unhealthy server to “None”, thereby restoring the server to a healthy state. After a root cause analysis, it was determined that the previous engineer mistakenly toggled the wrong server to a Down Admin State value when trying to do fixes on another server. Benefits of using Health Status Instead of creating a support ticket and waiting for assistance, they utilized the Health Status feature to diagnose and resolve the problem independently. This proactive approach not only minimized downtime but also reduced support costs and enhanced the overall user experience. Conclusion By incorporating the Health Status feature into their operational workflow, Contoso has been able to make efficient, data-driven decisions and troubleshooting issues promptly, ensuring their gaming services remain robust and reliable for their users. Get Started We are excited to bring the Azure Load Balancer’s Health Status feature to you. This feature provides valuable insights into the health of your backend instances, helping you ensure better troubleshooting for optimal performance and reliability of your applications. For more information and to get started, visit the following links: Overview of health status concepts How to retrieve health status We hope you can take advantage of this feature, and we welcome your feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment below.Secure, High-Performance Networking for Data-Intensive Kubernetes Workloads
In today’s data-driven world, AI and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads demand a robust, scalable, and secure networking infrastructure. As organizations rely on Kubernetes to manage these complex workloads, the need for advanced network performance becomes paramount. In this blog series, we explore how Azure CNI powered by Cilium, built on eBPF technology, is transforming Kubernetes networking. From high throughput and low latency to enhanced security and real-time observability, discover how these cutting-edge advancements are paving the way for secure, high-performance AI workloads. Ready to optimize your Kubernetes clusters?
Azure Firewall behind public load balancer configuration
Hi, I have a requirement to replace Sophos firewall with Azure Firewall Premium. The existing Sophos firewall is behind a public Azure load balancer (backend pool comprises the Sophos Firewall IPs). To set up a parallel configuration for Azure Firewall, I have configured a new public IP on the load balancer's frontend IP configuration. However, I do not see the Azure Firewall's public IP whentrying to configure a backend pool. All the listed IPs belong to the same subnet as the load balancer's internal IP. As per the below article, one can configure firewalls behind an external load balancer. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/firewalls/ I am trying to understand how to chain the public load balancer and Azure firewall such that I can access internal resources as is currently being done with the same public load balancer and Sophos firewall (NIC of Sophos is in the same subnet as internal NIC of this load balancer). Can someone please guide me? Thanks JamesIssue with Azure VM Conditional Access for Office 365 and Dynamic Public IP Detection
Hi all, I have a VM in Azure where I need to allow an account with MFA to bypass the requirement on this specific server when using Office 365. I've tried to achieve this using Conditional Access by excluding locations, specifically the IP range of my Azure environment. Although I’ve disconnected any public IPs from this server, the Conditional Access policy still isn’t working as intended. The issue seems to be that it continues to detect a public IP, which changes frequently, making it impossible to exclude. What am I doing wrong?
