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Comparing Service Endpoints and Private Endpoints in Azure

Khushbu Gandhi clarifies a choice:

For a long time, if you were using the multi-tenant, PaaS version on many Azure services, then you had to access them over the internet with no way to restrict access just to your resources. This restriction was primarily down to the complexity of doing this sort of restrictions with a multi-tenant service. At that time, the only way to get this sort of restriction was to look at using single-tenant solutions like App Service Environment or running service yourself in a VM instead of using PaaS.

This public access was a concern for many, and so Microsoft implemented new services that allow you to limit access to these multi-tenant services. Today, we have two solutions that on the face of it look quite similar, Service Endpoints and Private link/Endpoints. These two services are both designed to allow you to restrict who connects to your service, and how they do it. Because of this, it can be confusing to know which service to use and what the benefits are. In this article, we will look at these services and try to make your decision clearer.

Read on to see what the differences are between the two, as well as a comparison table and recommendations on which to choose in what circumstances.