Thoughts from the clouds
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
I recently had a project where we had the chance to convert a Palo Alto ruleset to an Azure Firewall Policy. I had recently created a script to generate a Firewall Policy for Microsoft 365 endpoints, so the challenge was using that work as a basis to generate an Azure Firewall Policy out of the … Continue reading Importing Palo Alto policies to Azure Firewall
You probably know Azure Virtual WAN: it is an Azure service that provides any-to-any connectivity across regions out of the box, or a “global transit network architecture”, as they describe here: Essentially Virtual WAN is a set of Microsoft-managed virtual hubs peered to each other, where you would connect your VNets and/or branches (ExpressRoute, Site-to-Site … Continue reading Azure Virtual WAN Hub Routing Preference
Azure Firewall is a fantastic product: oversimplifying, an architecture that scales out great, provides traffic forwarding and security in Azure, and is very easy to integrate in a network. Some times you need to manipulate the default routing of Azure VNets, and Azure Route Server offers an invaluable tool for that. However, Azure Route Server … Continue reading Azure Firewall’s sidekick to join the BGP superheroes
You might have read my previous intro post to the AAD Application Proxy, where I went over a quick intro to this service and a comparison with other reverse proxies available in the Azure portfolio. I finished that post with a very generic diagram describing how to combine multiple proxies to get different capabilities, for … Continue reading AAD Application Proxy: Where is my WAF?
I see more and more organizations deploying workloads across different clouds, and some times those workloads need to communicate between each other. There are multiple options to connect clouds together, the cheapest being an encrypted network tunnel over the public Internet, also known as IPsec VPN. All clouds support deploying your favorite network vendor as … Continue reading Tunnels Between Clouds
You might have come across a post from my good friend Adam on SDWAN Design options in Azure, where he details seven design alternatives when incorporating SDWAN to an Azure network. While I was reading Adam’s great summary, I was wondering whether I could summarize his design options and recommendations using the 3-tier cloud netowrk … Continue reading Where do I put my SDWAN?
One of the best kept secrets in Azure is Azure Active Directory (AAD) Application Proxy. When exposing web applications running in Azure or on-premises, we all tend to look at services such as Azure Front Door or Azure Application Gateway, but this little gem can make the life of a network administrator so much simpler. … Continue reading Where does AAD App Proxy fit with other Azure reverse proxies?
Azure Route Server is a very powerful tool that thas been recently brought to the Azure Networking toolset: it offers a BGP API so that virtual machines can communicate with a VNet to learn and advertise routes. I have written some articles about Route Server in the past on how to achieve certain scenarios, but … Continue reading Azure Route Server: to encap or not to encap, that is the question
After some questions in my previous blog post CLI-based analysis of an ExpressRoute private peering I decided to write an addition that includes what Expressroute Global Reach looks like for the CLI lover. In essence, Global Reach allows to use Microsoft’s backbone network for onprem-to-onprem communication. But how does it do it exactly? I have … Continue reading ExpressRoute Global Reach under the covers
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