Does Azure Point-to-Site or Site-to-Site VPN support cloud services?

Question

I haven't dug in completely, but I'm trying to figure out if the new Azure VPN offerings are just for your own VMs or if they will allow cloud services to connect to your corporate network. For example, I can I use it to have my worker role print to a network printer on my corporate network.

Answer 1

I haven't tried personally, but you should be able to do just that by joining your cloud service to a virtual network. See this article for details on how to do this: http://convective.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/windows-azure-cloud-services-and-virtual-networks/.

Answer 2

As long as your cloud service is part of a virtual network, it will have an IP address of the VPN subnet assigned to it, and all addresses are accessible (subject to your own networking configuration). Two things to be careful of:

1. The VPN IP address of the individual instances are subject to change. Every time a role recycles, or you redeploy, the instance IP address will change. This may be a problem if your security requires specific IP addresses. This can be helped by maintaining these ip addresses in your own DNS.
2. The cloud service load balancer is 'external' and cannot be placed on the virtual network. This means that your cloud service is not addressable as a single endpoint. You have to communicate with each individual role and load balance yourself. Similarly, outgoing data comes from individual roles, not the cloud service (see 1 above).