Thoughts from the clouds
Sometimes it is difficult analyzing the routing behavior of your Azure environment: on one side you have Virtual WAN routing rules, which are defined by settings such as routing intent and hub routing preferences, and on the other you have connectivity technologies such as ExpressRoute, SD-WAN and VPN tunnels with static routing or BGP. Not … Continue reading VWAN simulator: a digital twin for Virtual WAN
Large organizations usually adopt the “subscription democratization” principle to organize their cloud resources, since that allows for a cleaner billing structure and an easier way to manage Azure Policy assignments and Role-Based Access Control. The indirect consequence of having many subscriptions is having many virtual networks (VNet) too, which need to be provided with connectivity. … Continue reading Hub and spoke limits are (almost) gone
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: Optimize routing for Azure ExpressRoute Azure ExpressRoute: Designing for disaster recovery 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 … 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 Networking is already a complex enough topic, and if you add to the mix the moving parts of data analytics services the results are always interesting, to say the least. On top of that, documentation is not always created to explain in detail what is actually happening or why, adding insult to injury. Consequently, … Continue reading Connecting Microsoft Fabric to on-premises databases with Private Link
If you have been reading some of my blog posts, you probably know that I have been working on Azure networking for a while. Part of that work has consisted of helping customers to create network architectures based on their requirements. Last week I got a similar ask from a colleague for a large-scale hub-and-spoke … Continue reading Which Azure network design is cheaper?
Yesterday I got an interesting question. How does subnet peering interact with ExpressRoute? A quick look into the official docs for Subnet peering checks and limitations didn’t give any answers, and Copilot wasn’t very helpful either: So let’s dive in! What was subnet peering again? I wrote a blog post some time ago here, feel … Continue reading Subnet peering and ExpressRoute
