Thoughts from the clouds
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
The square design in ExpressRoute is not a recommended practice, but it can mean savings in ExpressRoute costs of up to 90%.
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
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 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
NOTE: custom routing and some of the features described in this article, such as manipulating propagation labels, are not supported if using Virtual WAN Routing Intent, a functionality required for cross-region communication over multiple secured hubs. Some organizations use Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) tables in their networks to segment traffic at the routing level. … Continue reading VRFs and 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
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
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
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?
Cloudtrooper 