Thoughts from the clouds
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: 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)
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
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%.
Cloudtrooper 