Securing Multi-tenant Azure App services using Azure Private Link

Microsoft has recently released a Public Preview of Private Link for Azure App Service.  This preview is available in limited regions for all PremiumV2 Windows and Linux web apps. Until this point securing App Services through Virtual Network Isolation was only possible through App Service Environments(ASE). ASE's are generally expensive and have long initial deployment...

Reducing latency through Proximity Placement groups in Azure

As a followup to my earlier blog post on Accelerated networking on Azure i am looking at other options available in Azure to reduce latency for Azure VM's. When you place your Azure VM's in a single region, the physical distance between VM's is reduced. Placing them within a single availability zone is another step...

Accelerated Networking in Azure

Azure Accelerated Networking is network throughput performance improvement feature provided by a Microsoft for Azure Linux & Windows Azure VM's. This feature enables a high-performance path and bypasses the host from the datapath, reducing latency and CPU utilisation, for use with the most demanding network workloads on supported VM types Without accelerated networking, all networking...

Securing Sitecore Topology deployed on Azure web apps(PAAS) using Application Gateway(WAF), Log analytics and Azure Monitor

Primary focus for the blog post would be to setup an Application gateway(WAF enabled) in front of a sitecore content delivery PAAS web app and test Azure WAF functiionality with SQL Injection attack using Log analytics and Azure Monitor(Log alerts) feature. Update: WAF Support for Sitecore is officially available from SItecore 9.1 as mentioned in...

Monitoring Sitecore Topology on Azure – Azure Metrics, App Insights, Azure Monitor, Service Health Alerts

Sitecore topologies(9.0.2) officially provided at https://kb.sitecore.net/articles/267409 contains the below Azure resources Azure web app Azure SQL Database Azure Search Azure Redis cache Azure Application Insights Looking at an overall Sitecore topology the below would be an architectural representation of the monitoring story.  App Insights collects the telemetry from all the web apps and measures web...

Saving costs for Sitecore environments on Azure PAAS using Automation

Azure Web apps and Azure SQL databases are primary components in Sitecore environments deployed on Azure PAAS. For example a XP Topology, Sitecore 9.0.2 ARM Templates deploys around 9 web apps in 6 different App Service Plans(Except XP-Single) 12 SQL databases in various service tiers As for Azure consumption, an Azure month is typically counted...

VNet Integration With Azure Web apps

Introduction Azure web apps are by design not deployed in a Virtual network. For scenarios where we need to setup a Site-Site VPN to On-Premise network using Azure Virtual Network gateway (VPN Gateway), VNet Integration (azure web app) is the way to go to provide better continuity for your workloads in hybrid cloud setup with Azure....

Subnetting from CIDR Notation

This blog post will help you understand subnetting using CIDR notation assuming you already have an idea about IP Address, Network ID and broadcast ID in networking. There are many approaches for understanding this but hopefully this approach might help you. I have an IP Address with a CIDR notation /20. Using this I need...

AWS VPC vs Azure VPN

Amazon has been a fore runner in the cloud computing arena and pioneered many industry revolutionizing services like EC2, VPC etc. AWS’s initial offering EC2-classic platform allowed customers to run ec2 instances on a flat global network shared by all the customers, also there were other attributes including shared tenancy, restrictions on Security Groups and...