Thoughts from the clouds
The AI era has brought many good things: from endless cat videos to applications vibe-coded during the lunch break, but there is also something else they have brought to the table: capacity issues in public clouds. If you are a user of public cloud, you have probably experienced this problem: the virtual machine size you … Continue reading Many-regions networking with Azure Route Server
There are two articles in Microsoft documentation that contain the most important guidelines to configure routing over ExpressRoute: Both are good articles and describe correct design patterns, but they were written a long time ago and most readers struggle to map those concepts to the current technologies available in Azure, most notably in Virtual WAN. … Continue reading Optimal routing with ExpressRoute – Revisited
This probably one of the least enticing blog post titles I have ever had. I will try to explain in a few paragraphs what this is going to be about, so that you can decide whether reading further or carrying on with your life. Reliability is one of the most important non-functional requirements for any … Continue reading Private global load balancing in Azure with anycast (no BGP)
Some weeks ago, Microsoft released documentation about the Virtual Network Routing Appliance (VNRA) without a lot of context, what generated a healthy confusion in the Azure Networking practitioner community. In the Azure updates page, the following was written: Azure Virtual Network routing appliance offers private connectivity for workloads across virtual networks. Using specialized hardware, it … Continue reading What is the Azure Virtual Network Routing Appliance?
Azure Networking is already a complex enough topic, and if you add to the mix the moving parts of data analytics services the results are always interesting, to say the least. On top of that, documentation is not always created to explain in detail what is actually happening or why, adding insult to injury. Consequently, … Continue reading Connecting Microsoft Fabric to on-premises databases with Private Link
If you have been reading some of my blog posts, you probably know that I have been working on Azure networking for a while. Part of that work has consisted of helping customers to create network architectures based on their requirements. Last week I got a similar ask from a colleague for a large-scale hub-and-spoke … Continue reading Which Azure network design is cheaper?
Yesterday I got an interesting question. How does subnet peering interact with ExpressRoute? A quick look into the official docs for Subnet peering checks and limitations didn’t give any answers, and Copilot wasn’t very helpful either: So let’s dive in! What was subnet peering again? I wrote a blog post some time ago here, feel … Continue reading Subnet peering and ExpressRoute
This post will explore the functionality in Azure Application Gateway for Containers (AGC) to integrate with an Istio service mesh in Kubernetes. This blog is part of a series: If you are here, you probably know what Application Gateway for Containers (AGC) is, if not, please refer to the previous posts in this series. You might not … Continue reading Application Gateway for Containers: Istio integration (6)
Azure Virtual WAN is one of the networking options offered by Azure, and routing inside of Virtual WAN has become a sort of dark art with the many supported options. Some years ago Routing Intent (also known as Routing Policies) was introduced to simplify routing, but at times you need to go back to the … Continue reading Virtual WAN static routes redistribution
This post will explore the new support in Azure Application Gateway for Containers (AGC) for Web Application Firewall (WAF) as documented in https://aka.ms/agc/waf. This blog is part of a series: Before we start, kudos need to go to the great Christof Claessens, author of this extremely useful Azure Monitor Workbook to triage WAF logs. Is WAF a big … Continue reading Application Gateway for Containers: Web Application Firewall support (5)
Cloudtrooper 