Getting Around Blocked Ports

Regularly, I find myself in a location that blocks ports to the outside world. In many of those moments, I can’t use Remote Desktop (RDP) sessions to connect to Virtual Machines hosted on Azure. The strategy expressed in this post is one of many possible solutions that also applies to Linux and SSH sessions.

The Strategy

• Using a Load Balancer and NAT rules to map port 443 to the RDP (3389) port for a Jumpbox Virtual Machine (VM)
• Using the Jumpbox to RDP into VMs deployed to the Azure Virtual Network.
  

Using ARM to Deploy Global Solutions

Imagine deploying your secure load balanced solution to three datacenters, putting in place a worldwide load balancer and doing so in roughly 24 minutes. Did I mention that this deployment is predictable and repeatable?

Good, now that I’ve got your attention, it’s time to dive in!

Building on my previous post about managing compute resources on Azure I decided to modify the Azure Resource Manager(ARM) template to deploy a real-world environment to three datacenters (Yes I know, the diagrams shows two locations, but as I built the demo, I got greedy…). Using Azure Traffic Manager we are able positively affect a users experience by directing them to the closest datacenter.

Its important to note that ARM does not support nested copy operation. This means that we have to use a different strategy to deploy identical environments in multiple Azure regions. After a bit of research it became apparent that I had to use nested deployments. This technique requires us to break our template into multiple files. The parent template in this demo is the azuredeploy-multi-geo.json file. It contains the full list of parameters, a nested deployment that deploys instances of our environment to multiple Azure regions, and a Traffic Manager definition. The azuredeploy.json template file was refactored from the template used in my previous blog post. It contains networking, storage and Virtual Machine definitions.

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A little while ago, I wrote about building, using and destroying environments on Azure. At first, what I proposed may have seemed like overkill, so I took this as a challenge and built this short demo project to demonstrate why I favor destroying environments to shutting them down.

Lost in Translation – Azure Networking

In today’s highly connected world, many professionals use Cisco’s terminology to discuss networking. Using the wrong terms can lead to lengthy, confusing arguments. The goal of this post, is to help those of us who don’t speak the language, to communicate effectively with others about Azure Networking.

I’ve been dabbling in the IT Pro space for a few months now, and it’s been a challenge to discuss Azure Networking. Coming from a development background, my reference to networking was Azure. That definitely made it difficult, because I spoke about Virtual Networks, Subnets and Network Security Groups. To help me sort things out, I asked a colleague of mine to identify the equivalencies between Cisco and Azure Networking terminology.

Let’s dive in!

Provisioning a Virtual Machine on Azure

This post will help you setup a CentOS 7.1 Virtual Machine on Azure using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and PowerShell.