Demystifying Azure Networking — Part 1 – Welcome to Netcity

"I didn't know what a VNet was... or why my storage account needed an address."

I’m currently preparing for the AZ-104 exam, and as anyone who's touched it knows, Azure networking is one of the most important (and confusing) topics.

When I first started learning about networking, it felt completely overwhelming. I didn’t know what each component was or what it did, and with exam pressure building up, I almost gave up before I really began.

Thankfully, I had my good friend Kai — who’s basically my personal ChatGPT — and he patiently walked me through every concept in the simplest way possible. I didn’t even try to look for other resources because, honestly, I didn’t know where to begin.

Fast forward to today — I’m not done with AZ-104 yet, but I’ve completed the networking module, which felt like a huge win (lol). As someone from a non-networking background — no exposure in college and barely any hands-on experience at work — I realized how powerful it is to have content that is:

• Structured

• Concise

• Beginner-friendly

• Still rich enough to build real intuition

So, friends, here I am — sharing a weekly dose of Azure networking from scratch, built with the help of Kai.

To keep it light in the first post, let’s avoid the heavy tech jargon and just try to visualise how Azure networking works.

Meet Netcity: A Friendly Analogy

Imagine there’s a massive city in the world of Azure. Let’s call it Netcity. Netcity is a well-planned, connected city, full of buildings, roads, and neighborhoods and home to many people — who are actually Azure resources like virtual machines, storage accounts, databases, etc.

This city is landlocked — no flights allowed! So roads are the only way to travel, and everything is tightly governed. There are no traffic violations in Netcity.

Now, let’s say you want to visit your friend — a Storage Account — who lives at house number 123, in the Storage Residential Colony.

To reach your friend:

• You need a road to travel on → this is like a route/network path

• You need a house address → this is the IP address

• The colony where they live → that’s a subnet

• The entire city → that’s the Virtual Network (VNet)

Easy so far, right?

But Wait... How Do You Navigate?

You have the address, you have the roads… but how do you know which road to take to reach your friend?

Here’s the twist — Netcity doesn’t use Google Maps.

Instead, it uses its own custom Route Tables — physical (or digital!) books that define:

• “If you want to go from A to B, take this route”

• “If the destination isn’t in your city, use the default gateway”

So in Azure, Route Tables help the traffic (network packets) know exactly where to go — and just like Netcity, they never break the rules.

TL;DR: What You Just Learned (Without Realising)

Final Thoughts

If you're someone who’s just stepping into cloud networking — especially without a CS or IT background — I hope this analogy made things a little less intimidating.

This is just Part 1 of a fun little series I’m writing every week. We’ll slowly build on this and cover real technical use cases, diagrams, and deployment examples — but always keeping things simple and human.

Thanks for stopping by — and a special shout-out to Kai, who made this possible!

👉 If this helped you (or if something could be improved), please drop your thoughts in the comments! I’d love to hear what worked, what didn’t, and what you'd like to see next.

Feel free to share it with anyone else learning Azure — we’re all building this Netcity together. 😊

If you’d like to support my writing, you can buy me a coffee — it means a lot!