Azure Network Security: a community shelf of scripts, templates and workshop labs

This is a sample repository, not a tool you install

The first thing to understand about this project is that it is not software in the sense most engineers mean. The repository description calls it resources for improving customer experience with Azure Network Security, and the project documentation describes it as a community repository designed to help with several things: deploying Azure NetSec resources programmatically using scripts and templates, managing configuration of those resources at scale using scripts, templates, Logic Apps and Azure Policy, integrating them with other tools such as Azure Sentinel, discovering best practices and techniques, and contributing samples back to the community.

That list is a description of intent, and it is worth reading as a list of techniques rather than a list of features. There is no package to add, no service to configure, no daemon to run. What you take away is a set of files you read, copy, adapt and run in your own subscription.

The top level directory listing explains the organisation. There are directories named for the individual Azure network security products, namely Azure Bastion, Azure DDoS Protection, Azure Firewall and Azure WAF, plus a Cross Product directory, a Lab Templates directory, a traffic directory, and a folder called Azure Network Security - Workshop. Alongside them sit the operational scaffolding of a Microsoft style community repo: a CODEOWNERS file, a CODE_OF_CONDUCT document, a CONTRIBUTING guide, a SECURITY file, a .azure-pipelines directory and an azure-pipelines.yml at the root, plus .github and .vscode directories. A primary language of PowerShell is a fair summary of what the samples are written in.

The wiki is described as holding further information, templates to use and other resources, and a separate What is New page is where the latest artifacts are collected.

Sentinel integration is the thread running through the samples

The package manifest in the repository root is unusually descriptive about what the content is for. The description field says the repository contains Azure network security artifacts, out of the box detection for Sentinel integration, queries, workbooks and playbooks to help with getting started with Azure network security.

Those three, queries, workbooks and playbooks, are Microsoft Sentinel artefact types, and the project documentation also names Azure Sentinel as a tool to integrate the NetSec resources with. So the intent behind many of the samples is not only to configure a firewall or a WAF, but to make the resulting telemetry queryable and actionable inside Sentinel. That is a coherent thread: a rule that fires in a portal is not much use if nothing consumes it, and a Sentinel query set that nobody deploys infrastructure for is equally inert.

The manifest also names the package itself, azure-network-security, at version 1.0.0, with an empty main field and a directories block pointing at a docs folder. The empty main field is telling. This is not a library that gets imported by anything, it is a container for content, and the version number in the manifest is a placeholder for a repository rather than a shipped artefact version.

The test tooling suggests the same. The scripts section is short, with a tsc entry and a test entry that runs mocha recursively against the TypeScript test files under.script/tests, with ts-node registering the loader:

  "scripts": {
    "tsc": "tsc",
    "test": " mocha --recursive --require ts-node/register .script/tests/**/*.test.ts"
  },

The.script directory at the top level is where that harness lives, and the presence of a tsconfig.json at the root is consistent with it. In other words, the repository has some of its own scaffolding checked in and validated, which is more than a pile of untested snippets, though the manifest says nothing about what those tests cover.

Running a sample means bringing your own Azure context

There is no install step to document here, because there is nothing to install. The samples are scripts and templates that you run against your own subscription, and the practical prerequisites are the usual ones for Azure automation: an authenticated session with sufficient permissions on the resources being created, and the right module versions for the script in question.

The dependency list gives a sense of the tooling the repository itself uses. It includes the Azure Avocado testing framework at version 0.11.0, mocha, ts-node, TypeScript and prettier, with chai and chai-as-promised in the dev dependencies. Avocado is the unit testing framework Microsoft uses for its own Azure client library work, so its presence here suggests the scripts are exercised with some rigour rather than only being illustrative snippets. The TypeScript and mocha setup is what backs the test command shown earlier, and the tsconfig.json at the root is the compiler configuration for that work.

Two details in the manifest are worth a second look if you are going to depend on the tooling. Prettier appears twice in the dependencies, once at 3.8.3 and once at 3.9.4, and ts-node appears twice as well, at 10.9.1 and 10.9.2. Duplicate entries for the same package with different version ranges is a sign that the manifest was edited by hand and merged rather than regenerated, which tells you not to treat it as a carefully pinned build environment. The license field in the manifest is also empty, and the author field is empty too, even though the repository carries a LICENSE file and the project documentation states the project is MIT licensed. A compliance check that reads package metadata rather than the LICENSE file will come back empty handed.

No support, no releases, and a contribution process that assumes Microsoft access

The support statement is unambiguous and it is the most important line in the project documentation for an evaluator. All automations within the repository are provided as is, without SLA or official support. The suggested remedy for a problem is to fill out a bug report and reference the automation artefact so the community can try to solve it. That is a community support model, and it should be treated as such when you decide whether an artefact can sit in a production path.

The release history reinforces the point. The repository has no GitHub releases at all, so there is no version to pin a deployment to and no changelog tied to a tag. The last push was on 2026-10-03 and the repository is not archived, so it is not abandoned either. What it is, is a moving target where the newest content is identified by a What is New wiki page rather than by a version number.

Contribution has its own requirements, and they are heavier than a typical community project. The project documentation states that most contributions require agreeing to a Contributor License Agreement that declares you have the right to grant the rights to use your contribution, and that a CLA bot will determine whether you need to sign and decorate the pull request accordingly. First time contributors are told to fork the repository before cloning, then create a branch, make the changes in GitHub Desktop, Visual Studio or VS Code, push and open a pull request for review. The repository has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct.

For an outsider used to a small open source project, the CLA and code of conduct steps are the main friction. They are not a blocker for reading the samples, but they do mean that a contribution from outside Microsoft is a process, not a formality.

What this repository is for, and where the alternatives sit

The comparison that matters is against the official product documentation and against the tools the repository itself points to, because the repository is a complement to both rather than a replacement for either.

The project documentation links out to the Azure Firewall documentation, the Azure Firewall Manager documentation, the Azure WAF documentation and the Azure DDoS Protection overview, plus the Azure Networking feedback forum and the Azure Network Security technical community blog. Those are the places for authoritative behaviour of the services. What this repository adds is the applied layer: how do you actually stand up a policy, a route, a WAF rule or a Bastion host as a repeatable script, and what does a working example look like.

The other option is to start from the product's own quickstart templates and adapt them yourself, or to build the deployment with your own infrastructure as code tooling rather than the PowerShell samples here. The difference is that a hand rolled deployment gives you a pipeline that fits your conventions, your state management and your CI, while these samples are standalone artifacts you have to review line by line before you trust them with a subscription.

That last point is the one to keep in mind. A sample in this repository gives you a working shape and saves you the blank page, but it also gives you code you did not write, aimed at a service version you cannot see from the file, with no release tag to compare against. The value is in the shape. The verification work is still yours.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository if you are standing up Azure Firewall, WAF or Bastion resources and want a working example to copy rather than a blank template, and if you can budget time to check each sample against the current Azure CLI and PowerShell modules yourself. Do not adopt it as a managed component of a production pipeline, because the project states that all automations come as is without SLA or official support, and the repository has no tagged releases to pin to. Before you build on anything here, open the file you plan to use, confirm the module versions and parameter names it expects still match your subscription, and remember that the manifest itself lists no licence, so the MIT status stated in the project documentation needs your own review for internal compliance.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Azure/Azure-Network-Security on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: MIT
4. README