Azure Peering Service
Following the Ignite 2019 conference, Microsoft has released the “Ignite 2019 Book of News”. The eighty-seven-page publication lists all updates and announcements made during the week of November 4th to November 8th. There, we can fid ninety-five items regarding Azure, and that excludes chapters on security and identity, for example, which also included cloud-related news.
With that in mind, it’s not hard to imagine, that among big announcements such as Azure Arc or Synapse Analytics, one might miss something maybe not as spectacular, but also amazing.
One such announcement is Azure Peering Service. At first glance, it looks like an offering which sits right in between ExpressRoute and Front Door. But let us take a bit of a closer look.
Peering Service is a networking service which builds on top enterprise-grade Internet connectivity and provides optimal and reliable access to services hosted in Microsoft’s cloud. It is delivered as a partnership between Microsoft and select Internet Service and Exchange Providers (ISPs and IXPs), which meet the technical requirements regarding redundancy and proximity.
Unlike ExpressRoute, the service does not establish a private, completely secure connection between an on-premises local area network and an Azure Virtual Network. It is instead targeted towards organisations which have a cloud-first policy or branch offices which do not host any workloads locally
When a customer enables the service for a specific IP prefix, the ISP/IXP will establish peering between their network and the Microsoft edge network (hence the similarity to ExpressRoute). This peering will then route all traffic from the provided IP prefix towards the closet MSFT Point-of-Presence (PoP). Therefore, traffic will still flow over a public connection, but it will not bounce around the Internet before reaching its destination. In this manner the Peering Service is similar to Azure Front Door — user requests enter the high-speed, high-throughput Azure backbone as soon as possible, and travel as much as possible, both ways, over the high-performance network.
As a result, end-users experience minimal latencies and maximal reliability. Microsoft refers to this mechanism as cold-potato routing.
On top of that, Azure Peering service is architected to provide both local and geographical redundancy and will always choose the optimal routing path based on current network conditions.
Next to the network acceleration and reliability improvements, customers can also register for peering service telemetry. This part of the service offers insights regarding performance, route monitoring and alerting in regards to any misconfiguration, BGP hijack attempts or any other anomalies. Naturally, this telemetry information is available via the Azure Portal.
The service is, therefore, an excellent option for locations which would not use the full potential of ExpressRoute, but rely heavily on secure and reliable connectivity towards Microsoft Cloud.
Price-wise, the cost will come primarily from the ISP/IXP. Azure only charges a flat telemetry add-on fee of 7.50 USD per prefix, per month. Also, please be mindful that the service is still in preview.
The Ignite session which covered Azure Peering Service is already available on YouTube, so if you’d like to know more, be sure to check it out. The video isn’t, however, published by the official Microsoft channel, so be aware that it might get taken down at some point. All Ignite sessions should get uploaded to the channel within a few weeks, though, so it shouldn’t be hard to find. For now, you can find it here:
Also, the documentation can be found here:
And the Ignite Book of News mentioned earlier is available here:
