Azure Network Security Groups

An Azure network security group is your one stop shop for access control lists. Azure NSGs are how you will block or allow traffic from entering or exiting your subnets or individual virtual machines. In the new Azure Resource Manager Portal NSGs are applied to either a subnet or a virtual NIC of a virtual machine, and not the entire machine itself. NOTE: At the time of this post, Azure has a pair of Azure portals, including the classic portal where NSGs are applied to a virtual machine, or the Resource Manager Portal where NSGs are applied to a VNic of a virtual machine. ...

August 3, 2016 · 4 min · eshanks

Setup Azure Networks

Setting up networks in Microsoft Azure is pretty simple task, but care should be taken when deciding how the address space will be carved out. To get started lets cover a couple of concepts about how Azure handles networking. To start we have the idea of a “VNet” which is the IP space that will be assigned to smaller subnets. These VNets are isolated from each other and the outside world. If you want your VNet to communicate with another VNet or your on-premises networks, you’ll need to setup a VPN tunnel. You might be wondering, how do you do any segmentation between servers without having to setup a VPN then? The answer there is using subnets. Multiple subnets can be created inside of a VNet and security groups can be added to them so that they only allow certain traffic, sort of like a firewall does. ...

August 1, 2016 · 3 min · eshanks

Guide to Getting Started with Azure

Following the posts in order, this guide should help you to understand and get familiar with Microsoft Azure. This is a guide to getting started with Azure that you can build upon to deploy your own public cloud environment. Azure Accounts and Subscriptions Azure Active Directory Integration Azure Resource Groups Setup Azure Networks Azure Network Security Groups Create Azure VPN Connection Azure Storage Accounts Setup Azure PowerShell Azure Virtual Machine Deployment Azure Network Interfaces Azure Cloud Services Azure Scale Sets Understanding the Multiple Azure Portals Using Azure Automation Microsoft Azure Official Links Azure Resource Manager Portal - https://portal.azure.com Azure Classic Portal - http://manage.windowsazure.com Microsoft Azure Documentation and Resources - https://azure.microsoft.com ...

July 18, 2016 · 1 min · eshanks

Azure Resource Groups

An Azure resource group is a way for you to, you guessed it, group a set of resources together. This is a useful capability in a public cloud so that you can manage permissions, set alerts, built deployment templates and audit logs on a subset of resources. Resource groups can contain, virtual machines, gateways, VNets, VPNs and about any other resource Azure can deploy. Most items that you create will need to belong to a resource group but an item can only belong to a single resource group at a time. Resources can be moved from one resource group to another. ...

July 18, 2016 · 2 min · eshanks

Azure Subscriptions

Azure is a great reservoir of resources that your organization can use to deploy applications upon and the cloud is focused around pooling resources together. However, organizations need to be able to split resources up based on cost centers. The development team will be using resources for building new apps, as well as maybe an e-commerce team for production uses. Subscriptions allow for a single Azure instance to separate these costs, and bill to different teams. ...

July 11, 2016 · 3 min · eshanks

Setup the Azure AD Connector

The cloud doesn’t need to be a total shift to the way you manage your infrastructure. Sure, it has many differences, but you don’t have to redo everything just to provision cloud workloads. One thing you’ll probably want to do is connect your Active Directory Domain to your cloud provider so that you can continue to administer one group of users. Face it, you’re not going to create a user account in AD, then one in Amazon and then another one in Azure. You want to be able to manage one account and have it affect everything. Microsoft Azure allows you to extend your on-prem domain to the Azure portal. This post focuses on the AD Connector and doing a sync. ...

June 27, 2016 · 6 min · eshanks