

Ingress traffic: The global BGP Anycast announcement ensures ingress traffic enters Microsoft network closest to the user. The software-defined WAN controller manages traffic engineering, ensuring low-latency path selection for your traffic and offering premium network performance.

The network is well provisioned with multiple redundant fiber paths to ensure exceptionally high reliability and availability. Routing your traffic via the Microsoft global network delivers your traffic over one of the largest networks in the world, spanning over 160,000 miles of fiber with over 165 edge Point of Presence (POP). By default, traffic is routed via the Microsoft global network for all Azure services. You can also set the routing preference for Azure storage resources such as blobs, files, web, and Azure Data Lake. The public IP address can be associated with resources such as virtual machine, virtual machine scale sets, internet-facing load balancer, etc. You can choose the routing option while creating a public IP address. Egress data transfer price varies based on the routing selection. These options are also referred to as cold potato routing and hot potato routing respectively. You can choose to route traffic either via the Microsoft network, or, via the ISP network (public internet). Azure routing preference enables you to choose how your traffic routes between Azure and the Internet.
