Azure Virtual Network Routing Appliance bridges peering speed and hub-and-spoke control

Microsoft has introduced the Azure Virtual Network Routing Appliance (VNRA), a managed forwarding layer designed to address the long-standing trade-off between VNet peering performance and centralised hub-and-spoke governance. Unlike traditional NVAs or Azure Firewall, the VNRA runs on dedicated networking hardware directly within the Azure backbone, offering tiers of 10, 50, 100, and 200 Gbps without becoming a traffic inspection bottleneck. It is deployed into a dedicated subnet within a hub VNet and does not perform firewall functions; traffic control still relies on UDRs, NSGs, and Azure Monitor. The service is particularly relevant for data-intensive workloads such as AI pipelines, centralised databases, and cross-VNet API calls that suffer under conventional hub appliance capacity limits. Built-in metrics for bytes, packets, and flows are available immediately after deployment, requiring no additional diagnostic configuration.
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