Thoughts from the clouds
After a good while without posting anything, I finally decided to slowly recommence again. This first post is about a little BGP trick that may help you increase the scale of Azure Route Server. Typically the maximum number of 8 BGP peers should be enough for most designs, but if you happen to need to … Continue reading Going beyond 8 peers in Azure Route Server
In Azure you have two main ways of managing your virtual network connectivity: self-managed hub-and-spoke and Virtual WAN. Virtual WAN is a solution where Microsoft manages part of your virtual networks for you, and in exchange it gives you some benefits such as any-to-any routing out of the box. However, what if you need that … Continue reading Interregional traffic in hub-and-spoke
The square design in ExpressRoute is not a recommended practice, but it can mean savings in ExpressRoute costs of up to 90%.
Designing network connectivity in public cloud can very quickly become a daunting task. Of course, public cloud providers do offer native networking services, and with those it is fairly easy. This should always be your primary route (pun intended). For example, in the case of Azure, using Virtual WAN and its native integration with both … Continue reading Designing your SDWAN and Firewall into Azure Hub and Spoke
Wow, that was a long title. Let me give you another one: if you haven’t tested your High Availability (HA) or Disaster Recovery (DR) plans, you shouldn’t rely on them. This is of course regardless of whether your infrastructure runs on your premises, on public cloud, or anywhere else. In this post I am going … Continue reading You want to use AS-path as your virtual hub routing preference
If you have ever used Azure, you probably have used one of these Virtual Network Gateways too: whether it is to connect your branches and headquarters with Azure via IPsec VPN or ExpressRoute, or to provide connectivity to your mobile workers or external partners through Point-to-Site VPNs. In this post I will go deep on … Continue reading Virtual Network Gateways routing in Azure
If you are reading my blog you probably know what Virtual WAN and Azure Kubernetes Service are. You probably know as well that you can configure AKS so that egress traffic is sent through an Azure Firewall by using Azure routing as described in the article Control Egress Traffic in AKS. That article explains how … Continue reading Filtering AKS egress traffic with Virtual WAN
I have recently had a couple of recent conversations that have made me reconsider the way we traditionally implement the hub and spoke Virtual Network design in Azure, which has some limitations. The idea is to introduce a relatively simple but powerful modification to the design that achieves these objectives: TL,DR: The main modification introduced … Continue reading Azure Hub And Spoke 2.0
I have had some questions around a common theme asked by some large Azure customers. These refrains might sound familiar to you: “I have run out of IPv4 addresses“, “My network team can only allocate so many IPs for Azure“, “How can I reuse IP space in Azure?“. If they do, I have a hack … Continue reading Overlapping IP addresses in a hub-and-spoke network (feat. AVNM & ARS)
As you might know, Azure Bastion enables management connectivity to virtual machines without having to assign them public IP addresses, and without having to maintain jump hosts in your Virtual Network. Up to recently, the virtual machines needed to be immediately peered to the VNet where Azure Bastion was deployed, but with IP-based connections Azure … Continue reading Azure Bastion routing in Virtual WAN
Cloudtrooper 