If you’ve experimented with Microsoft Azure, or are already using it for some of your IT functionality, you may be ready to take that next step and integrate your infrastructure with Azure so you can use it as an extension to your on-premises infrastructure. Finding all the information that helps you do this can be very time consuming. To help decrease the amount of time required to extend your datacenter to Azure, we’ve released the Datacenter extension reference architecture diagram, shown below.

The diagram shows what a datacenter extension might look like, but it probably also leaves you wondering what everything in it is exactly, and why it’s in the diagram.

What’s great about the diagram is that it’s interactive. You can click on every object in the diagram to learn more about it by looking at example data for how on-premises network, name resolution, and identities can be integrated with Azure. The picture below shows detailed data (on the right) for one of the virtual machines on the Azure side of the diagram when it’s clicked with a mouse.

At the bottom of the information listed in the box, there’s a “More information” link. Many of the objects link to a detailed design or implementation article that you can also read about the object. The list on the left of the picture under the word “Layers” is a list of diagram layers that you can turn on or off to view specific portions of the diagram, if you don’t want to look at all of it at the same time.

You can watch a video that provides a thorough walk-through of everything in the diagram, or you can just download the video’s script if you prefer. You can also download and modify the Visio diagram used for the diagram, or the Excel spreadsheet that contains all of the data in the diagram, as well as additional data not displayed in the diagram.

The diagram is updated from a March 30, 2015 release, if you happened to see it. Major changes from the previous release are detailed in the release notes in the interactive diagram.

We hope the diagram and the data within it accelerate your datacenter extension to Azure!