Category: Azure

There’s one thing no cloud vendor ever managed to change: virtual machines running on top of cloud infrastructure expect to have Ethernet interfaces.

It doesn’t matter if the virtual Ethernet Network Interface Cards (NICs) are implemented with software emulation of actual hardware (VMware emulated the ancient Novell NE1000 NIC) or with paravirtual drivers - the virtual machines expect to send and receive Ethernet frames. What happens beyond the Ethernet NIC depends on the cloud implementation details.

Donal O Duibhir was trying to get me to present at INOG for ages, and as much as I’d love to get to Ireland we always had a scheduling conflict.

Last week we finally made it work - unfortunately only in a virtual event, so I got none of the famous Irish beer - and the video about alternate universes of public cloud networking is already online.

Maximilian Wilhelm had great fun turning my usual black-and-white statements into tweets, including:

A few weeks ago I described the basics of AWS networking, now it’s time to describe how different Azure is.

As always, it would be best to watch my Azure Networking webinar to get the details. This blog post is the abridged CliffsNotes version of the webinar (and here’s the reason I won’t write a similar blog post for other public clouds ;).

Last Thursday morning I found this gem in my Twitter feed (courtesy of Stefan de Kooter)

Greg Cusanza in #BRK3192 just announced #Azure Extended Network, for stretching Layer 2 subnets into Azure!

As I know a little bit about how networking works within Azure, and I’ve seen something very similar a few times in the past, I was able to figure out what’s really going on behind the scenes in a few seconds… and got reminded of an old Russian joke I found somewhere on Quora:

Last week I covered network security groups, application security groups and user-defined routes in the second live session of Azure Networking webinar.

We also had a great guest speaker on the Network Automation course: Damien Garros explained how he used central source-of-truth based on NetBox and Git to set up a network automation stack from the grounds up.

Recordings are already online; you’ll need Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to access the Azure Networking webinar, and Expert ipSpace.net Subscription to access Damien’s presentation. Azure Networking webinar is also part of our new Networking in Public Clouds online course.

Last week we started the Microsoft Azure Networking saga that will eventually mirror the AWS Networking materials.

I recorded the hands-on demos in advance so we had plenty of time to discuss Azure API and CLI, geographies, regions and availability zones, high-availability concepts, and deployments models… and spent the second half of the live session focusing on virtual networks, subnets, interface, and IP addresses. The videos are already online and accessible with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription.

Next step (on September 24th): network security and user-defined routes.

Remember my rant about the glacial speed of Azure orchestration system? I decided I won’t allow it to derail yet another event and recorded the demos in advance of the first live session. The final videos are just over an hour long; it probably took me at least three hours to record them.

If you plan to attend the live webinar session on September 12th, you might want to watch at least the first few videos before the live session - I will not waste everyone’s time repeating the demos during the live session.

TL&DR: MIA

Six years ago, when I was talking about overlay virtual networks at Interop, I loved to joke that we must be living on a weird planet where Microsoft has the best overlay virtual networking implementation… at least as far as IPv6 goes.

Even then, their data plane implementation which was fully dual-stack-aware on both tenant- and underlay level was way ahead of what System Center could do.

After a few weeks of venting my frustrations on Twitter I finally completed Microsoft Azure Networking slide deck last week and published the related demos on GitHub.

I will use the slide deck in a day-long workshop in Zurich (Switzerland) on June 12^th and run a series of live webinar sessions in autumn. If you’re a (paid) subscriber you can already download the slides and it would be great if you’d have time to attend the Zurich workshop – it’s infinitely better to discuss interesting challenges face-to-face than to type questions in a virtual classroom.