Windows Azure - Communicate between web site and VM without enabling external/remote access

Question

I\'m new to Azure and have set up an Asure web site which will connect to a SOLR instance on an Azure VM. The web site cannot communicate with SOLR (port 8080) unless I crea

Answer 1

As @hhaggan stated, you cannot create a virtual network connection, or secure an endpoint, from Web Sites to a Virtual Machine. One option to consider is the use of SSL+certificate to secure the endpoint.

If you instead deploy your web application to a web role (in a cloud service) or a virtual machine, you can then take advantage of a brand new feature called Endpoint ACL. In essence, you can whitelist / blacklist a set of IP address ranges that may access your SOLR external endpoint. You can read about ACL'd endpoints, and how to configure them, here.

Now: You might be asking yourself why this doesn't work with Web Sites. That's because Web Sites runs on a server farm, and sites don't get unique IP addresses (unlike Cloud Services).