The Multi-Port Forward Server provides a single easy-to-use solution for managing network address translation (NAT) and port address translation (PAT) in your Microsoft Azure subscription. It provides access to internal services from the internet without directly exposing those systems themselves.

System administrators, network engineers and software developers typically find the Multi-Port Forward Server most valuable. The appliance provides a mechanism to listen for network traffic on a common port (like 80 or 443) and redirects it to an internal system listening on service-specific port.

The following example illustrates the need solved by the Multi-Port Forward Server. An IoT developer has a production MQTT server deployed which listens for MQTT traffic on ports 1883 and 8000. One of the developer's customers has a network firewall that drops all outbound network traffic which doesn't use ports 80 or 443. The developer can deploy a Multi-Port Forward Server which redirects all inbound port 80 traffic to the internal MQTT server destined for port 1883, as well as all inbound port 443 traffic to the same server destined for port 8000. This allows MQTT traffic to traverse the customer's network firewall and doesn't require reconfiguring the production MQTT server.

To configure the Multi-Port Forward Server, edit the /etc/multiportforward/multiportforward.config file and reboot the VM.