Well don’t I look silly. This blog should have been published some time ago. And I mean a time before that pesky little global pandemic came about. But, such is life, so here’s the belated content as a follow up to when I previously shared a run down of ARM Custom Script extension vs Desired State Configuration extension and why I would use one over the other. I hinted at this follow up blog and a solution to execute multiple Custom Script Extension (CSE) scripts post deployment. Unfortunately a myriad of things got in the way and I’m publishing this a year some time later… ? To begin, there i ..read more

When you consider network connectivity to Azure services, authenticating with your IDENTITY over a HTTPS connection would seem to be reasonably secure. You have your identity which has controls and policies to ensure you can do what is allowed of you to do and you’ve gone through numerous hoops to ensure you are who Azure AD has been configured to believe is you. If we take that one step further and move off of the public internet, ExpressRoute allows for private network connectivity to Azure. There’s a process to set the service up and extend on-premises networks to Azure. Traffic is encapsul ..read more

Okay, it’s actually two months ago that I started working at Microsoft. I’m blaming the delay on getting this out on the overall excitement for working at big-M. Regardless, it’s been a strange COVID laden process that’s meant that all the regular pleasantries and things that normally happen all got jumbled up and re-worked to fit the new narrative of a post COVID world. After writing 1500+ words I dedicated to re-write this blog. The intention was to re-focus the outcome to something that may provide better value. Having looked from the outside in for many years, I always aspired to work at a ..read more

It’s an age old saying: time flies when youre having fun. At the end of December, I finished up at Telstra Purple. I joined Kloud on January 5th 2015. I remember being told I was #27. At a start up I guess that’s significant. Kloud grew from that start up into a large organisation. There’s been a lot more people come, and sadly some go, since that excisting summer day in January. It’s not been acquired and re-branded and morphed into Telstra Purple. Similar ideas, different execution. This last year though I’ve thought about perspective and a few of the things I’ve picked up over the last 6 ye ..read more

Picking up the same theme as my last blog, and enticing you dear reader with a another provocative title, in this blog post I'll further expand on using CSV files, but target my displeasure of writing the equivalent of War in Peace but in Terraform, at another great Azure service- Azure Firewall. Specifically with this example, Azure Firewall Network Rule Collections, there's another opportunity to reduce the amount of writing of Terraform code required to achieve the target state. How this came about was because of the outcomes of my previous blogs in needing to route lots of CIDR ranges thou ..read more

Let's address the title first. Yes, I know that click-batey goodness of a title got you here. It's a bit uncool of me. However, I think it's warranted as there's method behind the sneaky madness. If you want to enjoy more Netflix, CSVs in Terraform can save you a bunch of time (as well as lots of lines of code; for me: a total of 170,000 to be exact). Let me explain… Let's talk Azure Route Tables. I appreciate there's not a universal use case for this scenario, but I certainly think there's more resources this can be applied to than just Route Tables. However, Route Tables are funny in that th ..read more

The last coffee I had was a strong decaf cappuccino on Monday January 13th of this year, or 123 days ago (to 2020-05-15). Before that I had a regular coffee mocha on January 6th. Not that i'm counting. Over the last 4 years I've slowly been eliminating the drug Caffeine from my life. Like any addiction it's been a tough uphill struggle. For me that struggle was not so much the caffeine itself, more so the coffee that the caffeine hitched a ride with. My morning ritual when I sat at whatever customer or office desk I happened to be at was the same: take a quick overview of the world through my ..read more

The address space for a given VNet can be as small as a CIDR /29 with 8 available IP addresses- please don't ever assign that small or an address space to VNet! So, that address space can go all the way up to a CIDR /16 with 65,536 IP addresses (maximum amount of IP's available per VNet). Another fun fact is that subnets, that make up the allocated address space for a VNet, can only have a maximum of 3,000 provisioned per given VNet (source). So subnetting at that scale needs a bit of planning. More on that another time perhaps. Now that we've got some constraints laid out, I thought I'd share ..read more

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. I even blogged about it as I also thought this was a great option given the new functionality and services around Azure networking that was made available around the time. Since then I've worked with a number of customers on this topology. I've seen differen ..read more

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