In my recent posts on creating a virtual machine on Windows Azure and connecting to a Windows computer running on Windows Azure, I mentioned endpoints but didn’t explain the process for creating new ones, i.e. opening up new ports for Internet access:

The RemoteDesktop endpoint shown above was created automatically when my virtual machine was provisioned but it may also be necessary to create new endpoints, for example allowing HTTP access over TCP port 80, HTTPS over TCP 443, etc.

To create a new endpoint, open up the virtual machine in the Windows Azure management console, then select Endpoints and click the Add Endpoint button at the bottom of the screen.  When creating endpoints, a new endpoint can be established or, if one already exists, this may be selected to load balance between multiple virtual machines. I only have a single virtual machine and so I selected add endpoint:

At this point, specify a name (HTTP would have been a better name than the one I used in the example below), select a protocol, and chose the port numbers:

The endpoint will then be created and the virtual machine will be accessible using the chosen protocol and port numbers:

To test the connection, I connected to my virtual machine over RDP and configured Windows Server roles/features in Server Manager (I installed IIS, just to prove that the machine was Internet-connected – but the server could be running any workload). Then, I connected to my virtual machine’s public DNS using a web browser (I could also have used the public virtual IP address shown in the dashboard for the virtual machine):