Connect local network with azure

Question

I don't know how to begin on the following. I will explain with the picture below what i want to do.

Like you so you have 2 parts. The local part and the azure part. The azure part is my part. The local network could be a customer, ....

What i went to do is running a service on the pc's and send that data to the local server/gateway. But how can i detect to what server it needs to connect. I don't install any service on the local pc's, that does the customer itself. But i don't want that he needs to do configuration. Just like they install the server/gateway part.

I will run a webservice on azure that gets information from the server/gateway on the local network. So thats no problem. On azure there are some other application that will process the messages.

Also how can you send some message back to the local network? When you say on azure ping the other local computer on the network. You should send a message to the server/gateway on your local network. But how?

So i have 2 questions(see above for more information):

• Connecting from the clients to the server/gateway

• Send some information back to the local netwerk

Answer 1

You can use Virtual Network, Azure Connect to create a "connection" or "hybrid cloud" between the PCs and the Azure cloud. However, if you are talking about web based/simple messaging and the PCs have internet connectivity why not just route the messages through a secure (SSL/TLS) connection to the cloud?

For broadcasting/push-type notifications, please look at SignalR (http://signalr.net/). Microsoft is making that part of the ASP.NET platform: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-034

It has some real nice functionality like gracefully, falling back on multiple mechanisms if advanced things like WebSockets are not supported by the server/client. This is an ideal solution and super scalable, since it is server based and very light on the client.

Answer 2

If you need to connect only one or more services running on you local network and make them available publicly via azure cloud.

The most straight forward solution i found was to use the services bus. Its require nearly no modification to you business network.