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 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.

IntroductionMulti-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.

A lot of the work I do professionally involves transforming traditional network culture, practices, and technology. Just as DevOps transformed application delivery, NetDevOps is here to make sure the network can keep up. This post will cover how I deploy this blog with Hugo to GitHub Pages using GitHub Actions to completely automate the workflow. This is very similar to how I approached modernizing network documentation for my current employer. Listen to Day Two Cloud Podcast as I talk through this transformation in more detail.

Ansible Tower VS AWXThe best way to learn is by constructing your own knowledge, not passively absorbing information. A lot of great projects are open source these days, including The AWX Project. At zero cost, you can build your automation skill set, increasing your chances at landing that next big promotion. This post will cover how to setup Ansible AWX on Debian. I use a combination of Ansible and Terraform in the NetDevOps toolchain.