Now what is Azure Virtual WAN?
WAN, of course, stands for wide area network.
Now, when you're deploying virtual networks in Azure,
you may be fine with just one hub and then that's it,
or you may develop what Microsoft calls a hub‑spoke architecture
where you have virtual network peerings that link and create routing
paths between multiple virtual networks.
Then when you layer in adding VPNs and ExpressRoute and Point‑to‑Site VPN,
it becomes quite a lot for many businesses who may not
have dedicated network‑competent staff, you see?
So Azure Virtual WAN is a managed VNet hub where you give up,
you surrender, quite a bit of control over that hub virtual network.
But in exchange,
you get essentially a turnkey experience as far as creating
peerings and developing simple‑to‑complex,
hub‑and‑spoke virtual network architectures.
Again, turnkey with just clicking the mouse a few times,
you can plug in ExpressRoute and VPN connections,
there's BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, baked into the virtual WAN managed hub.
If you're going to do user‑defined routing as
opposed to just Azure system routing, it makes route propagation a lot easier.
So that feature, that BGP capability and Virtual WAN,
evidently was so successful and popular that it's now
surfaced outside of the Virtual WAN as a separate product
called the Azure Route Server.
If you're interested in more about this Azure networking stuff,
I'll give you a reference at the end of this lesson.
We don't need to know too much about Virtual WAN,
I just want you to know that it's a way for businesses to
develop hybrid cloud and hub‑spoke virtual network architectures
with less experience required than deploying and configuring all these resources manually.