So lately I finally had some time, and went over my Azure Networking lab to refresh it a bit. First things first, here is where you can find it: https://github.com/erjosito/azure-networking-lab.
Secondly, what is this thing? It is a relatively comprehensive lab that demonstrates how different features of Azure networking work together. It essentially revolves around one question: how do I integrate third-party network appliances (such as next-gen firewalls) in Azure?
Before going too deep into the details, let me tell you that the answer to that question is complicated. Turns out that a bunch of different concepts are involved:
- User-Defined Routing, or how you change Azure routing behaviour
- Load balancers: so that your network virtual appliances have some sort of redundnacy. In this new version of the lab including the standard SKU (as opposed to the basic one) with the HA Ports feature
- Azure VPN Gateways: you probably want to access your VMs from your on-premises infrastructure
- Network Security Groups: you need these very frequently, I use them in the lab in some “creative” ways
- Hub & spoke vnet peering designs: so that you can leverage your 3rd-party network applicances across multiple Vnets
And yes, there is still some job to do. For once, lab 8 is still not fully operational, since I am waiting on standard public IP address support on VMSS. And there are other stuff that might be interesting to check, such as bringing in Availability Zones, or some of the interesting Network Watcher functionality.
But don’t waste any longer reading this post, and go to the lab, you just need an Azure subscription to start rolling!
Cloudtrooper 