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The Azure Relay service enables you to securely expose services that run in your corporate network to the public cloud. You can do so without opening a port on your firewall, or making intrusive changes to your corporate network infrastructure.

The relay service supports the following scenarios between on-premises services and applications running in the cloud or in another on-premises environment.

  • Traditional one-way, request/response, and peer-to-peer communication
  • Event distribution at internet-scope to enable publish/subscribe scenarios
  • Bi-directional and unbuffered socket communication across network boundaries

Azure Relay differs from network-level integration technologies such as VPN. An Azure relay can be scoped to a single application endpoint on a single machine. The VPN technology is far more intrusive, as it relies on altering the network environment.

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