Azure Networking Portfolio Consolidation
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 What is load balancing and content delivery? | Microsoft Learn Azure Network Foundation Services Overview | Microsoft Learn What is hybrid connectivity? | Microsoft Learn What is Azure network security? | Microsoft Lea 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.
Accelerate designing, troubleshooting & securing your network with Gen-AI powered tools, now GA.
We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Azure Networking skills in Copilot, an extension of Copilot in Azure and Security Copilot designed to enhance cloud networking experience. Azure Networking Copilot is set to transform how organizations design, operate, and optimize their Azure Network by providing contextualized responses tailored to networking-specific scenarios and using your network topology.
Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP) public preview announcement
What is virtual network TAP? Virtual network TAP allows customers continuously stream virtual machine network traffic to a network packet collector or analytics tool. Many security and performance monitoring tools rely on packet-level insights that are difficult to access in cloud environments. Virtual network TAP bridges this gap by integrating with our industry partners to offer: Enhanced security and threat detection: Security teams can inspect full packet data in real-time to detect and respond to potential threats. Performance monitoring and troubleshooting: Operations teams can analyze live traffic patterns to identify bottlenecks, troubleshoot latency issues, and optimize application performance. Regulatory compliance: Organizations subject to compliance frameworks such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can use virtual network TAP to capture network activity for auditing and forensic investigations. Why use virtual network TAP? Unlike traditional packet capture solutions that require deploying additional agents or network appliances, virtual network TAP leverages Azure's native infrastructure to enable seamless traffic mirroring without complex configurations and without impacting the performance of the virtual machine. A key advantage is that mirrored traffic does not count towards virtual machine’s network limits, ensuring complete visibility without compromising application performance. Additionally, virtual network TAP supports all Azure virtual machine SKU. Deploying virtual network TAP The portal is a convenient way to get started with Azure virtual network TAP. However, if you have a lot of Azure resources and want to automate the setup you may want to use a PowerShell, CLI, or REST API. Add a TAP configuration on a network interface that is attached to a virtual machine deployed in your virtual network. The destination is a virtual network IP address in the same virtual network as the monitored network interface or a peered virtual network. The collector solution for virtual network TAP can be deployed behind an Azure Internal Load balancer for high availability. You can use the same virtual network TAP resource to aggregate traffic from multiple network interfaces in the same or different subscriptions. If the monitored network interfaces are in different subscriptions, the subscriptions must be associated to the same Microsoft Entra tenant. Additionally, the monitored network interfaces and the destination endpoint for aggregating the TAP traffic can be in peered virtual networks in the same region. Partnering with industry leaders to enhance network monitoring in Azure To maximize the value of virtual network TAP, we are proud to collaborate with industry-leading security and network visibility partners. Our partners provide deep packet inspection, analytics, threat detection, and monitoring solutions that seamlessly integrate with virtual network TAP: Network packet brokers Partner Product Gigamon GigaVUE Cloud Suite for Azure Keysight CloudLens Security analytics, network/application performance management Partner Product Darktrace Darktrace /NETWORK Netscout Omnis Cyber Intelligence NDR Corelight Corelight Open NDR Platform LinkShadow LinkShadow NDR Fortinet FortiNDR Cloud FortiGate VM cPacket cPacket Cloud Suite TrendMicro Trend Vision One™ Network Security Extrahop RevealX Bitdefender GravityZone Extended Detection and Response for Network eSentire eSentire MDR Vectra Vectra NDR AttackFence AttackFence NDR Arista Networks Arista NDR See our partner blogs: Bitdefender + Microsoft Virtual Network TAP: Deepening Visibility, Strengthening Security Streamline Traffic Mirroring in the Cloud with Azure Virtual Network Terminal Access Point (TAP) and Keysight Visibility | Keysight Blogs eSentire | Unlocking New Possibilities for Network Monitoring and… LinkShadow Unified Identity, Data, and Network Platform Integrated with Microsoft Virtual Network TAP Extrahop and Microsoft Extend Coverage for Azure Workloads Resources | Announcing cPacket Partnership with Azure virtual network terminal access point (TAP) Gain Network Traffic Visibility with FortiGate and Azure virtual network TAP Get started with virtual network TAP To learn more and get started, visit our website. We look forward to seeing how you leverage virtual network TAP to enhance security, performance, and compliance in your cloud environment. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to refine and expand on our feature set! If you have any questions please reach out to us at azurevnettap@microsoft.com.Introducing Layer 7 Network Policies with Advanced Container Networking Services for AKS Clusters!
We have been on an exciting journey to enhance the network observability and security capabilities of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters through our Azure Container Networking Services offering. Our initial step, the launch of Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) filtering, marked a foundational step in enabling policy-driven egress control. By allowing traffic management at the domain level, we set the stage for more advanced and fine-grained security capabilities that align with modern, distributed workloads. This was just the beginning, a glimpse into our commitment to enabling AKS users with robust and granular security controls. Today, we are thrilled to announce the public preview of Layer 7 (L7) Network Policies for AKS and Azure CNI powered by Cilium users with Advanced Container Networking Services enabled. This update brings a whole new dimension of security to your containerized environments, offering much more granular control over your application layer traffic. Overview of L7 Policy Unlike traditional Layer 3 and Layer 4 policies that operate at the network and transport layers, L7 policies operate at the application layer. This enables more precise and effective traffic management based on application-specific attributes. L7 policies enable you to define security rules based on application-layer protocols such as HTTP(S), gRPC, and Kafka. For example, you can create policies that allow traffic based on HTTP(S) methods (GET, POST, etc.), headers, paths, and other protocol-specific attributes. This level of control helps in implementing fine-grained access control, restricting traffic based on the actual content of the communication, and gaining deeper insights into your network traffic at the application layer. Use cases of L7 policy API Security: For applications exposing APIs, L7 policies provide fine-grained control over API access. You can define policies that only allow specific HTTP(S) methods (e.g., GET for read-only operations, POST for creating resources) on particular API paths. This helps in enforcing API security best practices and prevent unnecessary access. Zero-Trust Implementation: L7 policies are a key component in implementing a Zero-Trust security model within your AKS environment. By default-denying all traffic and then explicitly allowing only necessary communication based on application-layer context, you can significantly reduce the attack surface and improve overall security posture. Microservice Segmentation and Isolation: In microservice architecture, it's essential to isolate services to limit the blast radius of potential security breaches. L7 policies allow you to define precise rules for inter-service communication. For example, you can ensure that a billing service can only be accessed by an order processing service via specific API endpoints and HTTP(S) methods, preventing unauthorized access from other services. How Does It Work? When a pod sends out network traffic, it is first checked against your defined rules using a small, efficient program called an extended Berkley Packet Filter (eBPF) probe. This probe marks the traffic if L7 policies are enabled for that pod, it is then redirected to a local Envoy Proxy. The Envoy proxy here is part of the ACNS Security Agent, separate from the Cilium agent. The Envoy Proxy, part of the ACNS Security Agent, then acts as a gatekeeper, deciding whether the traffic is allowed to proceed based on your policy criteria. If the traffic is permitted, it flows to its destination. If not, the application receives an error message saying access denied. Example: Restricting HTTP POST Requests Let's say you have a web application running on your AKS cluster, and you want to ensure that a specific backend service (backend-app) only accepts GET requests on the /data path from your frontend application (frontend-app). With L7 Network Policies, you can define a policy like this: apiVersion: cilium.io/v2 kind: CiliumNetworkPolicy metadata: name: allow-get-products spec: endpointSelector: matchLabels: app: backend-app # Replace with your backend app name ingress: - fromEndpoints: - matchLabels: app: frontend-app # Replace with your frontend app name toPorts: - ports: - port: "80” protocol: TCP rules: http: - method: "GET" path: "/data" How Can You Observe L7 Traffic? Advanced Container Networking Services with L7 policies also provides observability into L7 traffic, including HTTP(S), gRPC, and Kafka, through Hubble. Hubble is enabled by default with Advanced Container Networking Services. To facilitate easy analysis, Advanced Container Networking Services with L7 policy offers pre-configured Azure Managed Grafana dashboards, located in the Dashboards > Azure Managed Prometheus folder. These dashboards, such as "Kubernetes/Networking/L7 (Namespace)" and "Kubernetes/Networking/L7 (Workload)", provide granular visibility into L7 flow data at the cluster, namespace, and workload levels. The screenshot below shows a Grafana dashboard visualizing incoming HTTP traffic for the http-server-866b29bc75 workload in AKS over the last 5 minutes. It displays request rates, policy verdicts (forwarded/dropped), method/status breakdown, and dropped flow rates for real-time monitoring and troubleshooting. This is just an example; similar detailed metrics and visualizations, including heatmaps, are also available for gRPC and Kafka traffic on our pre-created dashboards. For real-time log analysis, you can also leverage the Hubble CLI and UI options offered as part of the Advanced Container Networking Services observability solution, allowing you to inspect individual L7 flows and troubleshoot any policy enforcement. Call to Action We encourage you to try out the public preview of L7 Network Policies on your AKS clusters and level up your network security controls for containerized workloads. We value your feedback as we continue to develop and improve this feature. Please refer to the Layer 7 Policy Overview for more information and visit How to Apply L7 Policy for an example scenario.
