Networking is a very important component to understand how Microsoft Azure works. This section will describe how IP addresses are assigned, and how we can access virtual machines from the Internet and from our own internal network.

You noticed that when deploying a virtual machine from the Azure Management Portal, there is no option to fill in an IP address. Each virtual machine in Microsoft Azure has its IP configuration assigned by DHCP. This DHCP server is managed by Microsoft. You should not change the IP configuration of the guest operating system. If you manually set IP addresses, this will work for a while, until the virtual machine is assigned a new host and the IP configuration is reset by the Fabric Controller.

Microsoft Azure uses software-defined networking. This means the logic of Azure responsible for networking needs to know which virtual machine has which IP configuration.

That is why the IP addresses are set by DHCP. A virtual machine gets an IP address...