This is going to be a gigantic pivot from my usual topics of writing. If you are interested in learning something about cryptocurrency, stay put. The goal is to make this unbiased and thought-provoking while shedding light on what seems like a world of confusion and misinformation. In the past month, I have heard various first-hand opinions about Bitcoin like, it is a pyramid scheme, basically gambling, will supersede the U.

In Part 1, we went over some fundamentals. For Part 2, we will examine Azure network design patterns based on cloud maturity and organization size. The concept of design patterns was first introduced by Christopher Alexander and has profoundly influenced many technical disciplines. To keep things simple, let’s define a design pattern as a reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem. Of course, you are not the first practitioner out there transitioning to cloud or growing to a new maturity model.

Is cloud networking complicated, or is it just different? In building your infrastructure in the cloud, end-to-end system complexity increases exponentially. As enterprise applications mature, the foundational infrastructure and networking used to host and transport them must evolve. One obvious crux of networking is blast radius - you cannot easily modify it without down-time. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series that will explore Azure networking. To the best of my ability, this series will be written to articulate real-world scenarios and bring attention to specifics that are critical to an understanding before diving into cloud networking architecture.

Manually provisioning infrastructure slows down application delivery, isolates knowledge, can hamper operations teams, and doesn’t scale. Automating infrastructure provisioning can address these challenges by shifting manual process into code. Hashicorp has products spanning the infrastructure, security, and application stack that can unlock that cloud operating model and deliver applications faster. Let’s examine image lifecycle management and IaaS deployment. Both of these tasks are common challenges faced by the enterprise when moving to the cloud.

Azure Private Link enables access to hosted customer and partner services over a private endpoint in an Azure virtual network. This means private connectivity over your own RFC1918 address space to any supported PaaS service while limiting the need for additional gateways, NAT appliances, public IP addresses, or ExpressRoute (Microsoft Peering). Hold on, wasn’t the point of Public Cloud to leverage services offered by third-party providers over the public internet? Why, then, would we want to contain traffic in our private IP space, which is likely routable across our on-premises network?