Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, private circuits between your WAN or datacentre and private networks you build in the Microsoft Azure public cloud. There are two types of ExpressRoute connections – Network (NSP) based and Exchange (IXP) based with each allowing us to extend our infrastructure by providing connectivity that is:

  • Private: the circuit is isolated using industry-standard VLANs – the traffic never traverses the public Internet when connecting to Azure VNETs and, when using the public peer, even Azure services with public endpoints such as Storage and Azure SQL Database.
[Keep reading] “Azure ExpressRoute in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation

Stacking the AWS CloudFormation

Automate your Cloud Operations blog post Part 1 have given us the basic understanding on how to automate the AWS stack using CloudFormation.

This post will help the reader on how to layer the stack on top of the existing AWS CloudFormation stack using AWS CloudFormation instead of modifying the base template. AWS resources can be added into existing VPC using the outputs detailing the resources from the main VPC stack instead of having to modify the main template.… [Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 2: AWS CloudFormation”

Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation

Operations

What is Operations?

In the IT world, Operations refers to a team or department within IT which is responsible for the running of a business’ IT systems and infrastructure.

So what kind of activities this team perform on day to day basis?

Building, modifying, provisioning, updating systems, software and infrastructure to keep them available, performing and secure which ensures that users can be as productive as possible.

When moving to public cloud platforms the areas of focus for Operations are:

  • Cost reduction: if we design it properly and apply good practices when managing it (scale down / switch off)
  • Smarter operation: Use of Automation and APIs
  • Agility: faster in provisioning infrastructure or environments by Automating the everything
  • Better Uptime: Plan for failover, and design effective DR solutions more cost effectively.
[Keep reading] “Automate your Cloud Operations Part 1: AWS CloudFormation”

Secure Azure Virtual Network and create DMZ on Azure VNET using Network Security Groups (NSG)

At TechEd Europe 2014, Microsoft announced the General Availability of Network Security Groups (NSGs) which add security feature to Azure’s Virtual Networking capability. Network Security Groups provides Access Control on Azure Virtual Network and the feature that is very compelling from security point of view. NSG is one of the feature Enterprise customers have been waiting for.

What are Network Security Groups and how to use them?

Network Security Groups allow us to control traffic (ingress and egress) on our Azure VNET using rules we define and provide segmentation within VNET by applying Network Security Groups to our subnet as well as Access Control to VMs.… [Keep reading] “Secure Azure Virtual Network and create DMZ on Azure VNET using Network Security Groups (NSG)”

Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 1

This post to wrap up my session at TechEd Sydney 2014 : DCI315 Azure VM Security and Compliance Management with Configuration Manager and SCM.

In this blog post series we will dispell some of the myths and dive into Azure VM Security.

With Azure AU Geo launched on TechEd Sydney 2014, Azure now has 19 Regions. More and more enterprises start migrating their workloads into Azure. Most of our clients have the same question – How do we manage security and compliance on Azure VM?… [Keep reading] “Azure VM Security using Azure VM Security Extensions, ConfigMgr and SCM Part 1”