TechEd Europe 2014 has seen some amazing service update releases for the Azure platform. Here’s a quick synopsis of some of the really exciting Azure Networking news that came out of TechEd Europe last week:

New Azure ExpressRoute Partners

  • Europe – Colt Technology
  • Asia – Tata Communications
  • Australia – Telstra

Cross-Subscription ExpressRoute Sharing

  • Sharing of each ExpressRoute circuit with up to 10 Azure Subscriptions
    • Access for up to 10 VNETs per Azure Subscription when sharing

Multiple ExpressRoute Circuits per VNET

  • Access up to 4 ExpressRoute Circuits per VNET
  • ExpressRoute Connectivity can be multi-region within the same Zone
    • Maintains current dual-port, Active-Active configuration
  • ExpressRoute Circuits can span providers

Network Security Groups

  • Per-VM and Per-Subnet (or both!) level segmentation
    • Up to 100 Network Security Groups per Azure Subscription
    • Up to 200 Rules per Network Security Group
    • Rule Priority designation
    • Rules support the following attributes
      • Source IP, Source port, Destination IP, Destination port, protocol

Forced Tunneling

  • Per-subnet forced tunneling of traffic to on premises networks

Multiple vNICs per VM

  • Up to 4 vNICs per VM based on type
    • Large (A3) and A6: 2
    • ExtraLarge (A4) and A7: 4
    • A9: 2
    • D3: 2
    • D4: 4
    • D13: 4
  • MAC persistence for the life of the VM!
  • Upcoming support for new appliances from vendors such as RiverBed!

Higher performance Site to Site (S2S) gateways

  • Details are scarce but expect to see support for more VPN tunnels (current limit is 10: 6 on premises and 4 Azure VNETs) and increased bandwidth capabilities

Improved VNET Gateway Security and Logging

  • Support for up to AES256 Encryption and Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) for VNET to VNET communications
  • Azure Portal now provides operation log data for Gateway operations

Traffic Manager Updates

  • Support for nested profiles

Azure Load Balancer Updates

  • Support for Source IP Affinity

 

These Azure Networking updates continue the trend of absolutely transformative news from TechEd Europe 2014 and really open the door for some exciting opportunities moving forward. For further reading pop over to the Azure Networking blog for some great reading and helpful code samples:

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/topics/networking/