Azure Becomes More Accessible For DevOps with ExpressRoute

As more businesses are moving to the public cloud because of its impact-driven services that are helping businesses compute their needs easily, many of them are experiencing performance issues, securities vulnerability problems, and even reliability concerns that are mistaken broadly for cloud shortcomings. These connectivity problems can be alleviated by establishing a direct connection across the cloud providers, and that’s where ExpressRoute comes in. 

Azure has developed ExpressRoute to help businesses resolve connectivity issues by providing a fast and reliable connection between Azure’s datacenters and organizational DevOps without compromising on security. ExpressRoute allows businesses to have seamless connectivity across all Microsoft online services, including Azure DevOps than common public internet connections. 

Since Microsoft has expanded its Azure accessibilities to the new regions, Northern Europe and the Western United States, businesses will be able to get extra resiliency features to protect their critical applications and data from datacenter-related failures.  

If you wish to discover more on how Azure ExpressRoute is helping DevOps improve their functional metrics, then continue reading the post to get the answers. But let us first begin with Azure Availability Zones, because of which all this becomes possible. 

What are Azure Availability Zones, and how it’s helping businesses with ExpressRoute? 

Azure Availability Zones are unique physical locations inside the Azure region that protects user’s applications and their critical data from data center-based failures. Microsoft declares that with the enlargement of these Availability Zones, users operating in Northern Europe and the Western United States of America will be able to design and execute all such applications that require low-latency synchronous duplication with heightened security against the datacenter lapses. Additionally, it is helping businesses with the following benefits.  

Giving Access to High-Performance Architecture 

Azure Availability Zones eliminate the risk of data failure by establishing a regional network setup that mainly connects three physically separated datacenters in each region. Its prime objective is to allow users to execute their most exigent workloads without any datacenter failure. The manual and logical disjunction of Availability Zones within an area facilitate consumers to safeguard their information and various applications from faults at any level of the network, allowing businesses to have access to high-performance architecture.

If we talk about Azure’s commercial availability in the global market, it’s widespread in over 140 countries with more than 100 active datacenters operational in 54 regions. With this, Azure becomes the global leader in providing cloud services with the most regions. It makes Azure potentially viable to provide its users first-class resiliency without any failure.    

Increasing Uptime SLA up to 99.99% 

According to the Microsoft Azure blog post, Azure allows organizations to have an industry-leading uptime SLA of 99.99% when its virtual machines are operating in two or more of the Accessibility Zones within a particular region. It’s one of the prime reasons why more businesses are now using zone-redundant services such as ExpressRoute to enable DevOps to build complex applications without bothering about datacenter failures.   

Azure services which assist these Zones are:

• Linux and Windows Virtual Machines
• Zonal Virtual Machine Scale Sets
• Managed Disks

With the expansion of availability zones, Microsoft ensures that end users have access to a wide range of choices for guaranteeing DevOps consistency. Azure, with more worldwide regions compared to any other cloud supplier, has been constructed to offer superior resiliency. 

Microsoft provides seamless connectivity to its all online services including Azure DevOps by using its peering configuration of ExpressRoute Circuits. To get the maximum benefits, businesses are required to configure route filters within the Azure region of their space. 

How to Configure Azure ExpressRoute to expand on-premises network? 

Azure ExpressRoute provides a seamless connection with the help of a third-party connectivity provider. With the help of these private connections, ExpressRoute will extend your on-premises networks within Azure. For the correct deployment, one needs to take care of a few things, which includes

• Architecture
• Connectivity Provider
• ExpressRoute Circuits 
• Troubleshooting Aspects
• Scalability Considerations
• Availability Considerations
• Security Terms 
• DevOps Dependencies

Once the above-mentioned criteria are set and you have an existing infrastructure that is already configured with a suitable network appliance, then only the deployment is successful. Once the deployment is done, the next important thing is know which DevOps Services can access ExpressRoute.

Which Azure DevOps Services Can Access ExpressRoute?

All DevOps Services can use ExpressRoute which complies with the criteria given below,

• All organizations working with URLs of Azure’s new and old legacies
• All self-hosted agents working for Azure Pipelines and Cloud Load Check
• Video Studio Portals that includes both Subscriber and Subscriptions Administration

Note: These facilities are not available for static DevOps content that relies on Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) for the execution.

Clients that are working in either government or financial services sectors would benefit the most from these updates as they always demanded more secure private networks because of the security concerns, and ExpressRoute is providing them with a faster, reliable, and low latency connection, as they want.

Final Thoughts 

With ExpressRoute, businesses can establish faster and reliable connections between Azure and DevOps. These connections when used for data transfer offer significant cost benefits, but only if they are configured successfully. If you want to take maximum advantages of Azure accessibilities, contact us at 1-888-288-3570.  Go4hosting can help you configure ExpressRoute Azure to scale up your DevOps practices, regardless of the business challenges.