Microsoft rolls out VPN Gateway NAT, Azure Application Gateway update

While some are focused on that other cloud conference, what's going on with Azure this week? I 'm glad you asked! We've got VPN gateway improvements, some Application Gateway updates, and new Azure Function features. Let's dig in!

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When your company sets up a local network, it is with a local IP range, such as starting at 10.1.1.1 or 192.168.1.1. When two of those networks need to talk over a VPN and there is an overlap of IP addresses defined, you have a problem. (You don’t want your office printer to suddenly share an IP address with your new Pixel 6 Pro.)

There's a new service for Azure VPN Gateway that can help though: VPN Gateway NAT.

The Network Address Translation (or NAT) feature is designed to solve that scenario. That is when private networks are connected using VPN over the Internet or across private WAN. NAT on a gateway device translates the source and/or destination IP addresses, based on the NAT policies or rules to avoid address conflict.

This is another step towards a more robust and versatile hybrid environment. Well done, Azure.

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Azure Application Gateway is a layer 7 routing service for incoming traffic for a web application. (Layer 7 as in t he HTTP layer, not a 7-layer dip.)

Among other features, you can route traffic based on URL path, such as /images or /customer, to multiple backend web applications. It's an elegant way to optimize a single customer facing site within your Azure infrastructure.

One of the hurdles has been that you had to fully qualify all paths you wanted to route, which was a bit rigid and, at times, hard to manage.

From this week though, Azure Application Gateway supports the use of wildcard characters such as asterisk (*) and question mark (?) for hostnames on a multi-site HTTP(S) listener. That should make the service so much more configurable for more scenarios!

What happens when Azure-loving Lars goes to the dark side and tries his hand at AWS tasks? We challenged Lars to walk (or stumble) through a scenario he'd never seen on a cloud platform he didn't know.

And finally, a small but significant update to App Services and Azure Functions.

The custom OpenID provider for these two services is now in general availability.

What's OpenID? It's an open standard and decentralized authentication protocol that works as a standardized way of authenticating users — such as when you log in to the event website to buy tickets for the Grease revival tour, using your Facebook account.

Well, you can now use custom OpenID providers — if you happened to have rolled your own. I'm not going to go into how you register you application with a custom OpenID provider, but Azure will in the docs here. Oh, did I mention it works with Azure Functions too?

We're at the end of the news for this week. I did want to mention that the brand new AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies course launched on the ACG platform this week. The incredible Azure Security Wizard James Lee is the master behind that course.

Well, as we say on the A Cloud Guru team when you realize too late that it is December and you haven’t got anything to wear, but then remember that the hat budget got approved early: “Seek and you shall cloud!" Keep being awesome, cloud gurus!

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