Besides understanding how Azure Storage works, understanding the networking aspect is just as important.
We will discuss two parts of networking in Azure: the part under the hood that is not visible to Azure customers, as well as the part that customers have control over.
Initially, when Azure was released in 2008, the network was a North-South design. Traffic originating from a server went North via several layers of switches and then South to the destination server. This design did not scale very well.
So, soon after the first release, Microsoft completely redesigned the network. All servers have at least 10 Gbps connection to multiple switches. In 2014, Microsoft even introduced new virtual machine sizes offering 40 Gbps InfiniBand network connections. Now, the network offers multiple connections from a single node to switches.
The following image shows the current Azure network diagram. On top of the Azure hosts, three layers of switches are seen...