I have an Azure VM on which I have installed speech-to-text service container on port 5000.
When I test the speech-to-text service inside the VM via browser, http://10.x.x.x:5000 it shows the page correctly;
However, when I access the same url on my local laptop connected to internal network, it gives a timeout error.
I have setup network security group rule to allow traffic on port 5000 and verified using IPFlow and there are no blocks;
Just to ensure that this is not a NetworkSecurityGroup firewall issue, I installed nginx container on the same VM on port 80, and I am able to access the nginx default home page within the vm and on my laptop using the url http://10.x.x.x without any issues.
I did some more digging and found that the issue is to do with internal firewall setting blocking non-regular ports (ex:5000).
As a temporary measure I have used SSH tunneling and port fowarding using putty client (based on idea here: akadia.com/services/ssh_putty.html).
After establishing the connection using putty, I am now able to specify in my application the speech to text container server as localhost:5000 and it forwards the request correctly to the remote speech to text server.
Meanwhile, i have requested my IT team unblock the port . Thanks for the useful comments Max and 4c74356b41