Hub and Spoke network topology in Azure

6th of March, 2020 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on Twitter: @LucianFrango.

Back in late 2016 I was lucky enough to go Microsoft Ignite in Atlanta (USA), which was a bit of a big deal as it was my first major conference. One of the take aways from the various technical sessions on Azure networking I attended was that Microsoft wanted to put a great deal of emphasis on the usage of a Hub and Spoke network topology. … [Keep reading] “Hub and Spoke network topology in Azure”

SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379

3rd of August, 2017 / / No Comments

Redis Cache is an advanced key-value store that we should have all come across in one way or another by now. Azure, AWS and many other cloud providers have fully managed offerings for it, which is “THE” way we want to consume it.  As a little bit of insight, Redis itself was designed for use within a trusted private network and does not support encrypted connections. Public offerings like Azure use TLS reverse proxies to overcome this limitation and provide security around the service.… [Keep reading] “SSL Tunneling with socat in Docker to safely access Azure Redis on port 6379”

Exchange in Azure: NIC disabled/in error state

22nd of August, 2016 / / No Comments

I recently had the need to build my own Exchange server within Azure and connect it to my Office 365 tenant.
I loosely followed the steps in this Microsoft article: https://technet.microsoft.com/library/mt733070(v=exchg.160).aspx to get my Azure (ARM) VMs and infrastructure deployed.

I initially decided to utilise an A1 Azure VM for my Exchange server to reduce my costs, however upon successfully installing Exchange it was extremely slow and basic things like EAC and creating mailboxes would not function correctly due to the lack of resources.… [Keep reading] “Exchange in Azure: NIC disabled/in error state”

Azure VNET gateway: basic, standard and high performance

23rd of July, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Originally posted @ Lucian.Blog. Follow Lucian on twitter @Lucianfrango.

I’ve been working a lot with Azure virtual network (VNET) virtual private network (VPN) gateways of late. The project I’m working on at the moment requires two sites to connect to a multi-site dynamic routing VPN gateway in Azure. This is for redundancy when connecting to the Azure cloud as there is a dedicated link between the two branch sites.

Setting up a multi-site VPN is a relatively streamlined process and Matt Davies has written a great article on how to run through that process via the Azure portal on the Kloud blog.

Read More

AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange

21st of July, 2015 / / 5 Comments

I discussed Azure ExpressRoute via Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) in my previous blog. In this post I am going to focus on AWS Direct Connect which ECX also provides. This means you can share the same physical link (1GBps or 10GBps) between Azure and AWS!

ECX also provides connectivity service to AWS for connection speed less than 1GBps. AWS Direct Connect provides dedicated, private connectivity between your WAN or datacenter and AWS services such as AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).… [Keep reading] “AWS Direct Connect in Australia via Equinix Cloud Exchange”

Amazon Web Services (AWS) networking: public IP address and subnet list

8th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Originally posted on Lucian’s blog over at Lucian.Blog.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has many data centre’s in many continents and countries all over the world. AWS has two key grouping methods of these data centres: regions and availability zones.

It can be very handy to either reference the IP address or subnet of a particular service in say a proxy server to streamline connectivity. This is a good practice to avoid unnecessary latency via proxy authentication requests. Below is an output of Amazon Web Services IP address and subnet details split into the key categories as listed by AWS via thier publishing of information through the IP address JSON file available here.

Sidebar: Click here to read up more on regions and availability zones or click here or click here. Included in these references is also information about the DNS endpoints for services that are therefore IP address agnostic. Also, If you’d like more details about the JSON file click here.

Read More

Connection Options When Building An Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution

7th of April, 2015 / / 3 Comments

If your business is migrating workloads to Azure the chances are at some point you will probably want to create a form of private interconnect with Azure. There is more than one way to achieve this, so in this post I’ll take a look at what options you have and the most appropriate scenarios for each.

We’ll work through the connection types from simplest (and quickest to provision) to more complex (where you’ll need IP networking expertise and hardware).… [Keep reading] “Connection Options When Building An Azure Hybrid Cloud Solution”

IPv6 – Are we there yet??

15th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

The topic of IPv6 seems to come up every couple of years. The first time I recall there being a lot of hype about IPv6 was way back in the early 2000’s, ever since then the topic seems to get attention every once in a while and then disappears into insignificance alongside more exciting IT news.

The problem with IPv4 is that there are only about 3.7 billion public IPv4 addresses. Whilst this may initially sound like a lot, take a moment to think about how many devices you currently have that connect to the Internet.… [Keep reading] “IPv6 – Are we there yet??”