When designing an application deployment to be hosted in Azure, a design consideration that is commonly enticing is to transform a layer of the application from traditional infrastructure to something more modern. Microsoft offer several Platform-as-a-service (PAAS) options that allow this to be achieved, for example, transforming SQL server installed on a VM to Azure SQL.

While this transformation might be straight forward from an SQL Database point of view and most likely when considering the cost of running your deployment, a concern that often arises is security. As Azure SQL is PAAS, it offers a public endpoint for SQL authentication and connectivity. This is by design and there are limited options to prefix this with a security layer. If your application runs somewhere outside Azure, this makes sense and might be an acceptable and noted weak spot. However, if the rest of your application layers are hosted within Azure, having to route out to a public endpoint is less secure than it could be and simply bad design.

Thankfully, Microsoft have been making updates to virtual network functionality that allow you to route directly from your virtual network resources to several PAAS offerings. To do this, you must make use of virtual network Service Endpoints.

Endpoints extend your virtual network private address space and the identity of your VNet to specific Azure services, over a direct connection. Endpoints allow you to secure your critical Azure service resources, such as Azure SQL, to only your virtual networks. Traffic from your VNet to the Azure service always remains on the Microsoft Azure backbone network and never takes a public route. They are currently available for three PAAS offerings:

1. Azure SQL
2. Azure Storage
3. Azure Data Warehouse (Preview)

Introducing an Endpoint for Azure SQL (to stick with the initial example) allows improved security as it fully removes public Internet access and allows traffic only from the virtual network.

It also optimises routing as Endpoints always take service traffic directly from your virtual network to the service itself on the Microsoft Azure backbone network. Doing this means that if your environment uses forced-tunnelling this traffic will no longer be viewed as outbound, but intra-Azure and will flow direct.

There are some considerations to be aware of:

• Location – the virtual network and the PAAS offering must be located in the same region.
• Outbound Network Flow – if you control outbound network flow via NSG, you can make use of the “Azure Service” tags to allow this traffic via Endpoint.
• Connections – If you enable a service endpoint, all current TCP connections from your virtual network will drop. This is to allow a change from Public IP access to Private.

Personally, I think Endpoints should be used as widely as possible. From a security and design perspective they allow greater ease of adoption when PAAS offerings are being considered and perhaps best of all, they are free!