Thoughts from the clouds
Large organizations usually adopt the “subscription democratization” principle to organize their cloud resources, since that allows for a cleaner billing structure and an easier way to manage Azure Policy assignments and Role-Based Access Control. The indirect consequence of having many subscriptions is having many virtual networks (VNet) too, which need to be provided with connectivity. … Continue reading Hub and spoke limits are (almost) gone
You might have read my previous blogs about subnet peering, like this introduction to subnet peering when it was launched and the effect of subnet peering on ExpressRoute routing a bit later. Subnet peering is a technique used in today a number of designs, one of them being the Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) topology in SAP RISE. … Continue reading An unexpected friendship: subnet peering and advertised gateway prefixes
You might have noticed that a very interesting new feature has been published in the Azure Front Door documentation: Edge Actions. I am not going to reproduce the documentation here, suffice to say as a quick (and probably oversimplified) intro that it is JavaScript code that you can run on web requests sent to an … Continue reading Azure Front Door Edge Actions
You might have heard about the Azure SRE Agent (https://aka.ms/sreagent). It is essentially an AI agent that reacts to alerts and troubleshoots the problems that generated them, and even remediates the root cause automatically if you will allow it. It is essentially an LLM with some custom prompts, skills and tools, specifically conceived for the … Continue reading Azure SRE Agent for Networking
This is a continuation from my previous post Azure Route Server route maps: more than a feature, where I discussed some of the patterns not supported by route maps in Azure Route Server (ARS), such as VNet-to-VNet VPN connections and BGP peers in another hub (although these ones might be addressed by the time route … Continue reading The square design with hub-and-spoke
If you have been following the Azure Networking space lately, you will probably have noticed the global preview of a new feature: route maps for Azure Route Server. Others have already blogged about this; for example, make sure to read Simon Painter’s blog post about it here. I finally had some time to try it, … Continue reading Azure Route Server route maps: more than a feature
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: Optimize routing for Azure ExpressRoute Azure ExpressRoute: Designing for disaster recovery 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 … 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?
