Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure

10th of April, 2018 / / 22 Comments

I recently was tasked with deploying two Fortinet FortiGate firewalls in Azure in a highly available active/active model. I quickly discovered that there is currently only two deployment types available in the Azure marketplace, a single VM deployment and a high availability deployment (which is an active/passive model and wasn’t what I was after).
FG NGFW Marketplace Options
I did some digging around on the Fortinet support sites and discovered that to you can achieve an active/active model in Azure using dual load balancers (a public and internal Azure load balancer) as indicated in this Fortinet document: https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/deployment-guides/dg-fortigate-high-availability-azure.pdf… [Keep reading] “Deploy active/active FortiGate NGFW in Azure”

Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure

15th of March, 2016 / / 8 Comments

WordPress is the leading content management system today owning more than 50% of the market share. WordPress on Microsoft Azure is becoming a very popular offering with the ability to host WordPress as an Azure WebApp. While Microsoft has made the process of spinning up a WordPress site very easy with built in gallery images, running business critical applications on a cloud platform also introduces challenges in terms on availability and scalability.

WordPress Architecture

A typical WordPress deployment consists of the following two tiers:

  • Web Frontend – PHP web site
  • Backend Data store
    • Relational data store – Hierarchical entity store
    • Object data store – Used to store uploaded images and other artefacts

In order to guarantee high availability and scalability, we need to ensure that each of these service tiers are decoupled and can be separately managed.… [Keep reading] “Highly available WordPress deployment on Azure”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2

4th of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

In the first post in this series we setup our scenario and looked at how we can build out an ultra highly available Azure SQL Database layer for our applications. In this second post we’ll go through setting up the MVC Web Application we want to deploy so that it can leverage the capabilities of the Azure platform.

MVC project changes

This is actually pretty straight forward – you can take the sample MVC project from Codeplex and apply these changes easily.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 2”

Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1

3rd of November, 2014 / / 2 Comments

As public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure mature it is becoming easier to build deployment architectures that are substantially resilient to faults in cloud platforms that are increasingly unlikely to ever eventuate due to the previously mentioned maturity!

We’ll take a look at how we can deploy an ultra highly available database-backed ASP.Net MVC Website using Microsoft Azure across this post and my next one.

Desired State

The diagram below shows what we will be aiming to achieve with our setup.… [Keep reading] “Deploy an Ultra High Availability MVC Web App on Microsoft Azure – Part 1”