can anyone explain difference between Azure Application Gateway, Virtual Network Gateway, Virtual WAN, ExpressRoute, Arc and Private Link, please?

It seems to me all services are pretty similar helping with connecting either on-prem to Azure, in-Azure to in-Azure or public to Azure.

CodePudding user response：

They're similar in that they all involve network traffic, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

Application Gateway is a Layer 7 load balancing service with advanced features like SSL termination. It's used to route client requests to your applications.

Virtual Network Gateway is a VPN gateway for point-to-site (user) and site-to-site (office/datacenter) VPN connections to your own Azure VNETs. This would, for example, allow you to RDP into Azure VMs from your on-prem office using their private IPs.

ExpressRoute is similar to site-to-site, however it doesn't use IpSec tunnels, it's a dedicated, unencrypted connection from your location directly into Microsoft's backbone. (i.e. you don't traverse the public internet). There's no encryption and the connection is faster. This is a service you need to work with a 3rd party internet provider to implement.

Virtual WAN is more like a networking hub where there would be many site-to-site, point-to-site, ExpressRoute, etc... connections spanning a wide area (as the name implies). This would be for large enterpise organizations with many on-prem locations.

Arc is a means of adding your on-prem resources into Azure for management. e.g. you have a physical server somewhere and you want to manage it though ARM/portal.

Azure Private Link is a feature of many Azure services (storage, SQL PaaS, etc..) which allows you to create a private DNS record and assign a private IP address on your internal VNETs. This is used when you want to disable all public network access to a resource and only allow access from within your own VNET.

I have barely scratched the surface of the differences here, but suffice it to say, there are many differences. From this page, you can type the service name into the search and get more specific details on the offering. Hope this helps.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/search/?terms=networking in azure