Is it December already? Alrighty then, that came fast again this year. Oh well,
time flies when you live in the cloud I guess. This time I have some VPN Gateway improvements,
some Application Gateway updates, and more Azure Function features. I'm Lars Klint and this is
Azure This Week, a show made entirely from the available space in your storage account.
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 VPN, and there is
an overlap of IP addresses as 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. The Network Address Translation, NAT, feature is designed to solve
that scenario. That's when private networks are connected using VPN over the internet or across
private WAN. NAT on a gateway device translate 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. If you'd like to learn more about
cloud development with, or without, specific networking elements, check out ACGs free plan.
Gives you access to free courses and quizzes, plus learning paths and original series content.
And you don't need a credit card to sign up. I'll include a link in the description below.
Azure Application Gateway is a layer 7, meaning the HTTP layer, routing service for incoming
traffic for a web application. Among other features, you can route traffic based on URL
path, such as, you know, /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 have 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 asterix, you know
the star (*) and question mark for host names on a multi-site HTTPS listener. That should make
the service so much more configurable for more scenarios. 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. If you're wondering what OpenID is, it is an open standard
and decentralized authentication protocol. It is a standardized way of authenticating users,
such as when you log into that event website to buy tickets for the Grease revival tour
using your Facebook account. Well, you can now use custom OpenID providers
if you happen to have rolled your own. I'm not going to go into how you register your application
with a customer OpenID provider, but that is why I've linked to the Azure docs below. Oh,
did I mention that it works with Azure Functions too? We are the end of the news for this week. I
did want to mention that the brand new AZ-500 course launched on the ACG platform this week.
The incredible Azure security wizard, also known as James Lee, is the master behind that course.
Also, check out some of the many other free original series we have on the ACG platform,
such as Cloud Provider Comparisons, certification guides, and Programming Languages of the Cloud.
There's much learning to be done. As we say on the A Cloud Guru team, when you realize
too late that it's December and you haven't got anything to wear, but then remember that the
hat budget got approved early...I forgot to bring up the Santa hat...got approved early.
Remember that the hat budget got approved early,
"Seek and you shall cloud." See you next week and keep being awesome Cloud Guru Santas.