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?

AnsibleFest 2020, like most conferences this year, took place completely virtual. I presented on Automating IPAM In Cloud: Ansible + Netbox. You can find the slides along with the demonstration code in this git repo. In this post, I’m going to expand a little further on the content I presented. What is IPAM? IP Address Management (IPAM) is the critical component that organizes your IP addresses and networks in one place.

Introduction Multi-Cloud is making its rounds. Network and Security engineers face increasing challenges with managing complexity and risk as they work to react with more agility to enable business outcomes. At the start, enterprises didn’t just decide they would be multi-cloud. They started with a single cloud, likely Amazon Web Services and tailored their strategy around that cloud’s architecture and features. A little time passes, and now those engineers that are still evolving to handle AWS are tasked with adopting Microsoft Azure.