Hands-On Networking with Azure
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Introduction to Microsoft Azure Networks

One of the major facts in our life is networking. In the beginning, human beings used to make networks communicate with each other to fulfill their needs. That's why when the computer revolution took place, networks were a very important piece of the puzzle to let computers communicate with each other.

Through the whole of the IT revolution, networks used to be an indispensable part of every IT environment to have a properly functioning environment. It is no surprise that networking is a vital part of cloud from many aspects, starting from the remote connection to your Azure VMs, to spanning your environment across on-premises and Azure. You will notice that networks are used with almost all Azure services, this includes, but is not limited to Azure VMs, Azure SQL Databases, Azure Web Apps, and so on.

At the time of writing, Microsoft Azure is generally available in 36 regions, with plans announced for six additional regions, as shown in the following table:

This global presence means you can build your networks in the nearest region, and access them from anywhere in the world, considering that Microsoft keeps building new data centers in new regions, so latency between your on-premises environment and Azure is decreased.

You can find out the nearest region to you with the lowest latency via the following website http://www.azurespeed.com/. Azure services are available in 140 countries around the globe and support 17 languages, and 24 currencies.