Azure traffic direction explanation

Question

I am really not clear what outbound(egress) and inbound(ingress) traffic means. I have two theories

1. inbound just specifies that the origin is outside and target inside i.e. HTTP round trip to some VM hosted web is ingress, the response with HTTP 200 status goes the same established route back

2. inbound is anything from internet and outbound is anything to internet. So HTTP roundtrip to azure VM is ingress and also egress (HTTP response), both of which can have different route(in case of asymmetric routing.

My question is if the VM does not have route back to internet, will it serve properly the HTTP or the response cannot reach the originator in internet?

Answer 1

Inbound traffic originates from outside the network, while outbound traffic originates inside the network.

My question is if the VM does not have route back to internet, will it serve properly the HTTP or the response cannot reach the originator in internet?

Assuming you have a web server running on it, you just need to configure on firewall rules to enable inbound / outbound traffic for port 80 and 443