To say there have been a lot of Azure announcements at Ignite is an understatement. Several important services have hit GA and several exciting new services have been announced. Rather than re-list them all (I’ll link through at the end), I am going to highlight those I am most excited about, and think will be relevant to most clients.

Below is a graphical overview of the new approach to Azure networking, which contains four pillars, Connect, Protect, Deliver and Monitor.

Starting with Connect, two ExpressRoute related announcements immediately grabbed my attention. Microsoft now offer 100Gbps connectivity speeds via ExpressRoute Direct which is the fastest cloud connectivity available.

Helping customers with geo-distributed offices, ExpressRoute Global Reach was announced, allowing customers to connect offices using their existing circuits. Additional to this concept, Azure Virtual WAN is now GA. With that move, Microsoft also added new preview features including P2S VPN and ExpressRoute connectivity shown below:

The final announcement in Connect that really will make a difference to clients is Public IP Prefix. This means that you can now request a range of static IP addresses for your resources that you will “own”. This will make white-listing and administration of your public presence a lot simpler.

Moving to the Protect pillar, Azure Firewall has now moved to GA. Which is a great service for those looking to have control over their breakout point in Azure without deploying and maintaining an NVA.

Rounding out Protect, Service Endpoint Policies. These allow more granular control over access to Azure resources over your vnet service endpoint. See previous post on endpoints for more.

From the Deliver pillar, the announcement of Azure Front Door in preview is the big one. AFD is a global entry point for you applications that is scalable and secure. The ability to scale and level of integration with existing services will make this widely used by customers with a large public facing presence.

There are also updates to Application Gateway which improve performance, introduce redundancy and increase the level of integration with over services.

From the final pillar, Monitor, the main announcement is Virtual Network TAP in preview. This allows for continuous mirroring of VM traffic to a collector, without any agents. This the first of these services in a public cloud and will allow for greater analytics and granularity of environment traffic.

For the entire round-up from Microsoft, head here.