Is it possible to enable IIS SMTP Service on Azure instances?
I had this very same conversation with someone at Microsoft just the other day.
Azure doesn't support the SMTP service because if it did, it would quickly become the world's biggest spamming engine and the Azure IP address range would soon be blacklisted.
The answer I was given is to relay through an on-premise or third-party SMTP relay service.
You might be able to achieve something with a VM Role, or maybe a different SMTP solution in a worker role, but for the reasons given above, I wouldn't bother.
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I'm finishing a desktop App (Winforms). Azure MS SQL on server-side and WinForms clients. So they can come from unpredictable IP... So its impossible set new firewall Azure rule for every client network move...
My question what is the best approach to secure access from clients and how to set Azure firewall rules...
(the client uses a SQL server login)
on some forums, people recommend bypassing the azure firewall by setting rule 0.0.0.0-255.255.255.255 but it does not seem as good secure solution for me)
possible solutions I'm considering:
a) Setup a VPN on AZURE for the client (any tip for a good tutorial, and how to limit client traffic only for AZURE = client watching youtube will not spend my azure budget?
b) any third party VPN? (most of the VPN providers don't offer permanent IP but dynamic range)
c) another way
Thanks!
Pavel
I would suggest a Client, Server, Database architecture. As a rule you generally don't want your clients connecting directly to a database. If you configure a WebAPI to contact the DB and allow your clients to communicate with that API it would be a much better approach
We are migrating our website on Azure platform in PaSS model. our website needs to communicate to our back office system using web services.
Currently the Back Office system is in a providers data center. and we have a firewall which enables web service communication for specific IP's
Now website going to be hosted on Azure with PaSS model, can some one please advice which IP address we need to add in whitelist of our Back office firewall.
Please note we want to set up our web app to be out-scaled to multiple instances.
will each instance will be able to communicate with out Back office ?
Regards
Umesh Deshmukh
can some one please advice which IP address we need to add in
whitelist of our Back office firewall. Please note we want to set up
our web app to be out-scaled to multiple instances. will each instance
will be able to communicate with out Back office ?
For a long-term, Hybrid Connection is much better. If you still want to know whitelist the outbound IP of web app service, you could find these possible outbound IP addresses in additional outbound IP addresses setting of the web app properties. You can't know beforehand which IP address a given app instance will use to make the outbound connection, so your back-end service must open its firewall to all the outbound IP addresses of your app. You could get more details about Inbound and outbound IP addresses in Azure App Service.
You could use Azure Service Bus Relay to connect your web app to your on-premises database that's behind the firewall. Azure service bus relay uses internet port 80 so there should be no firewall issues. Hope it helps.
Within an App Service is a feature called a Hybrid Connection, which can be found under the Networking section of the App Service you want to connect to your back office.
You will create a new Hybrid Connection via the Portal.
Complete the form with the information that pertains to the back office system you want to connect to. You should always use a Fully Qualified Domain Name for all your back office systems. If you are connecting to multiple back office systems, you will need one Hybrid Connection for each one.
A Hybrid Connection relies on a Service Bus Relay to communicate with your on-premises resources.
You will install the Hybrid Connection Manager in your on-premises systems and connect it to the Service Bus Relay you created in the portal.
Once the Hybrid Connection you create in the Portal has been connected to a Hybrid Connection Manager (called a Listener), the connection will show as Connected in the Portal.
Once connected, an application running in an App Service will be able to communicate with your on-premises resources as if they were sitting right next to each other. There is going to be some inherent latency involved with using a Hybrid Connection and this should be planned for. The latency we have seen using Hybrid Connections have been minimal and are usually barely noticeable. I have even heard that people are streaming media from on-premises systems using Hybrid Connections.
More information about Hybrid Connections can be found here.
We need to develop integration between ERP (Dynamics Nav) and cloud-based telephony provider.
The provider needs to have an endpoint published and accessible from internet but for security reasons it is not possible for us to allow inbound connections to our network. I think it should be possible to solve this by hosting small application in Azure which will serve as endpoint for telephony provider and to which ERP will connect as outbound persistent connection. The app will just forward requests to ERP.
Since I'm new to Azure the question is what of azure capabilities I could use to solve the task aside from hosting actual VM with application there?
I've just implemented the same using Azure Service Bus.
The VOIP system is putting a small JSON with call details after the end of the call and I'll get the messages from the Service Bus Queue from NAV.
The code is not complicated at all the whole solution is simple and cheap!
Let me know if you want to know more (= you need the code).
Cheers!
Azure AD has the concept of an "application proxy" that will open internal applications up using a connector that runs on prem. This doesn't require inbound ports and is protected by Azure AD authentication.
It's intended more as a user-facing way to get access to Legacy applications, although I don't see why it couldn't be used for integration as well.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/application-proxy-publish-azure-portal
Otherwise, you could link an Azure Site to Site VPN up and use a service like API gateway to manage connections though this is more complicated.
I have a site hosted on Windows Azure and currently I am using SendGrid to send emails. However, we have Mimecast as our email provider and it is marking all emails received from SendGrid as spam.
Is there a way to use Mimecast as the SMTP Relay service from my Windows Azure application?
Well,
Azure as such does not apply any restriction on the outgoing traffic (beside some bandwidth throttling based on the Size of the VM you are running on, but this quite generous). So in practice you can use any SMTP relay service.
Whether you can use Mimecast specifically, you shall turn to Mimecast support or products page. But there is nothing in Azure that would stop you from using this or that service (any service).
And Yes, you can use System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient or any other Smtp Client library to talk to external SMTP Service. Whether that external SMTP Service will accept your connection or not, is not subject to any kind of Azure limitation, but sole decision of the service you chose to use.
You should raise a ticket with SendGrid so they can manage this situation. The reason SendGrid is provided is to precisely avoid your mail being marked as spam. You will be unlikely to see any successful mail delivery if you route SMTP traffic directly from an Azure host to a receiving SMTP server.
We integrate with a third-party service where we can run queries which is right now secured using HTTPS encryption and username/password. We send our queries from a service running on the Windows Azure cloud.
The third-party provider wants to migrate towards better security and they have asked us to either
Setup a VPN - which is problematic because for we'd need to use Azure Connect and they'd have to install the client endpoint service on their part.
Provide some IP address where the queries will come from so they can filter out anyone else at the firewall level - which is problematic because AFAIK you cannot fix the IP addresses of the Windows Azure Compute nodes.
Suggest another secure alternative - the only thing I could think of is to set up the VPN with them on a non-Azure server and then tunnel the requests through using Azure Connect - which is obviously extra work for us and also defeats the point of hosting the service on a cloud if it depends on a non-cloud service.
Any ideas?
Can they install the Azure Connect endpoint on another server on their DMZ network? i.e. not the actual server which hosts their service?
Can we somehow provide them with static IPs for incoming queries?
Any other solution that is scalable?
Thanks
If I understand the scenario correctly, your Azure service is a client to a 3rd party service. This scenario may be solved through the use of the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus. You would need to install a proxy app in the 3rd party's datacenter that would be responsible for establishing the connection to the service bus. The connection comes from inside the 3rd party's datacenter, so no new incoming holes in the firewall. The connection can handle WCF connections with all its security strengths, and users can be authenticated with ACS.
Here is a starting point: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee732537.aspx
There is a hands on lab in the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit that explains most of the details that you'll need.
IMHO, HTTPS is already very good; and I don't exactly see how a VPN would make the system any more secure. In particular, VPN is no silver bullet, if your VM is compromised then the VPN connection is compromised too (same for HTTPS). On the other hand, the IP restriction would indeed reduce the attack surface.
Then, using a server outside the cloud is a poor idea indeed. Not only it defeats most of the benefits of the cloud (been there, done that and suffered a lot), but also it also makes the whole thing less secure with more complexity and more attack surface.
Windows Azure does not provide anything that look like a static IP at this point. In our experience, IP addresses for a given service change once in a while even if the service is only upgraded (and never deleted). Static IP addresses have been an important feature request for a long time, Microsoft will probably provide it at some point, but it might still take many months.