Quick Note — Recommend a Connectivity Solution that Connects Azure Resources to On-Premises Networks
AZ-305 › Unit 4: Design infrastructure solutions › Design network solutions › Recommend a connectivity solution that connects Azure resources to on-premises networks
Quick Note — Recommend a Connectivity Solution that Connects Azure Resources to On-Premises Networks
A large international retailer's IT team negotiates two complementary contracts in the same quarter. The first contract is for a 1 Gbps ExpressRoute circuit from their primary datacenter to Azure West Europe — 24-month commit at several thousand dollars per month from a chosen carrier partner. The second is a fallback Site-to-Site VPN over the public internet — pennies per month relative to the carrier circuit, configurable for up to roughly 1 Gbps of throughput per tunnel. Both contracts go live in the same week. Three months later, fibre work near the datacenter accidentally cuts the ExpressRoute circuit for roughly 6 hours.…
Retrieval target
- Recommend a Connectivity Solution that Connects Azure Resources to On-Premises Networks
- Closed-book recall
- 5 minutes
- Open the full lesson after a miss
Decision anchors
| Prompt | Compact answer |
|---|---|
ExpressRoute | A private layer-3 connection from your on-prem network to Microsoft's edge — bypasses the public internet entirely. Provided via an ExpressRoute Partner (or ExpressRoute Direct for 10/100 Gbps ports). SLA 99.95% (or 99.99% with two circuits). Lower / more predictable latency, higher bandwidth, encrypted but not over the internet.… |
| ExpressRoute peering types | Private peering — Azure VNet → on-prem private IP space. The default for VM-to-VM hybrid traffic. Microsoft peering — Microsoft public services (Office 365, Storage public endpoints, etc.) via ExpressRoute instead of internet. Used for stricter audit / latency. Public peering — legacy, deprecated; replaced by Microsoft peering. A single ExpressRoute circuit can support multiple peerings simultaneously. |
| ExpressRoute SKUs — Local / Standard / Premium | Local — cheapest; data into the same metro Azure region; included data transfer. Pick when source + destination are in one geography. Standard — included data transfer within the geopolitical region; cross-region traffic billed per GB. Default for most hybrid stacks. Premium — global reach: data ingress / egress anywhere in the world, more VNets per circuit (10+), larger routing tables.… |
VPN Gateway | An Azure-managed VPN endpoint inside a VNet. Two patterns: Site-to-Site (S2S) — IPsec tunnel to an on-prem VPN device or another cloud; Point-to-Site (P2S) — individual users connect via OpenVPN / IKEv2 / SSTP clients. SKUs: Basic (deprecated for new), VpnGw1–5 with capacity scaling, Active-Active + zone-redundant variants. Cheaper than ExpressRoute; relies on internet, so latency varies. |
Read the answers once, then cover the right-hand column and reconstruct each one from the prompt. A useful answer names the requirement, the recommended control or service boundary, and the nearest alternative it rejects. If you can only recognize the answer after seeing it, retrieval is not yet secure.
Ninety-second explanation
Without notes, explain:
- What requirement signals this learning objective rather than a neighbouring one?
- Which two solution families are most likely to be compared?
- Which hard constraint eliminates the strongest distractor?
- What identity, network, data, or failure boundary must appear in the design?
- Which operational test would prove the recommendation works?
Then compare your explanation with the full lesson. Record the missing decision rule—not merely the missed product name—in your error log.
When to open the full lesson
Open the curriculum-linked lesson when you cannot explain a comparison, when a scenario depends on a numeric limit or SKU feature, or when the service is on a retirement path. Use current Microsoft Learn documentation for availability, limits, pricing, naming, and migration milestones; the quick note is intentionally compact.
Source and freshness
Derived from the linked AZ-305 lesson and retrieval deck, grounded in both attached course sources. Reviewed 2026-08-02. Current Microsoft documentation controls changing product contracts.