Thoughts from the clouds
Disclaimer: this post is going to be quite geeky. So this is not the kind of post you want to read if you don’t need this stuff. But hey, I needed to tell someone after getting this to work, plus this might be useful for somebody else, since I struggled to find these details out … Continue reading Simulating VPN sites in Azure with Ubuntu 24.04 and StrongSwan
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
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)
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
One of the most common and yet complex networking designs in Azure is interconnecting Azure IaaS workloads deployed in a Virtual Network, vSphere virtual machines in an Azure VMware Solution private cloud, and on-premises networks. My esteemed colleague Robin Heringa kindly gave me access to an AVS cluster, so armed with the fantastic possibilities that … Continue reading Azure VMware Solution networking voodoo
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
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
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
Cloudtrooper 