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%.
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
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 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?
If you work in Azure, you probably know about Connection Monitor, a tool that generates synthetic traffic to test connectivity and measure response times. You configure sources (Virtual Machines) to generate traffic that can be addressed to destinations such as other Virtual Machines or any external endpoint outside of Azure. Alerts can be automatically generated … Continue reading Test like a champ with Azure Connection Monitor
This article was posted in 2020. In the meantime, Azure Virtual WAN Routing Intent has been released with the functionality of securing hub-to-hub traffic. See the official documentation page here: https://learn.microsoft.com/azure/virtual-wan/how-to-routing-policies. You probably know Azure Virtual WAN, an Azure technology that abstracts hybrid networking by providing Microsoft-managed Virtual Hubs that use the Microsoft backbone to … Continue reading Virtual WAN: secure hubs in multiple regions
Cloudtrooper 