Network Security Groups (NSG) is one of the new network features that’s available in Azure. At least as long we are using the data center in North Europe (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/new-networking-features-now-available-in-the-north-europe-region/). By leveraging NSGs we are able to control inbound and outbound network traffic all the way down to each separate VM. This is great in those cases where we have to implement high security and hard policies on our services. For example between the public facing endpoints and backend servers in a SharePoint deployment.
To use it, we need version 0.8.10 of the Azure PowerShell module, and the commands are
- Get-AzureNetworkSecurityGroup
- Get-AzureNetworkSecurityGroupConfig
- Get-AzureNetworkSecurityGroupForSubnet
- New-AzureNetworkSecurityGroup
- Remove-AzureNetworkSecurityGroup
- Remove-AzureNetworkSecurityGroupConfig
- Remove-AzureNetworkSecurityGroupFromSubnet
- Remove-AzureNetworkSecurityRule
- Set-AzureNetworkSecurityGroupConfig
- Set-AzureNetworkSecurityGroupToSubnet
- Set-AzureNetworkSecurityRule
The function is somehow self explained and the link at the bottom of this post explains it even a little bit more. But the best way to get to know them is to use Get-Help, and then just try 🙂
Documentation
- About Network Security Groups
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn848316.aspx