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Best Practices for Designing a Hub-and-Spoke Architecture in Azure
The Hub-and-Spoke architecture is a common networking model in Microsoft Azure, designed to improve security, manageability, and scalability for enterprises and cloud workloads. By centralizing network resources in a hub and connecting multiple spoke virtual networks (VNets), organizations can enforce governance while enabling controlled communication across workloads. However, designing an optimal Hub-and-Spoke architecture requires careful planning to ensure security, performance, and cost efficiency. This post will explore the best practices to help you build a robust and scalable architecture in Azure. 1. Understanding the Hub-and-Spoke Model In this architecture: The Hub serves as the central point for connectivity, hosting shared services like firewalls, VPN/ExpressRoute gateways, and identity services. The Spokes are individual VNets that connect to the hub, typically representing isolated workloads, applications, or business units. Peering is used to establish communication between the hub and spokes, with the option to enable or restrict direct spoke-to-spoke communication. Key Benefit: Centralized management of network traffic, security, and hybrid connectivity. 2. Designing an Effective Hub The hub is the backbone of your architecture, so it must be designed with scalability and security in mind: ✅ Use Azure Virtual WAN if you need a global-scale Hub-and-Spoke deployment with automated routing and traffic management. ✅ Leverage Azure Firewall for centralized security and to enforce traffic control between spokes. ✅ Implement Network Security Groups (NSGs) to restrict inbound/outbound traffic and define granular security policies. ✅ Optimize traffic flow with Route Tables (UDRs) to avoid asymmetric routing and performance bottlenecks. ✅ Ensure high availability by deploying redundant VPN or ExpressRoute gateways in active-active mode. Tip: Avoid placing unnecessary workloads in the hub to prevent performance degradation. 3. Managing Spoke Communication and Isolation Each spoke VNet should be logically and securely isolated while allowing required communication paths. ✅ Limit direct spoke-to-spoke communication by routing traffic through the hub unless specific business requirements demand otherwise. ✅ Use Private Endpoints to securely access PaaS services without exposing them to the public internet. ✅ Enforce Zero Trust principles by using Azure Private Link and restricting access to critical workloads. Tip: Avoid transitive peering unless absolutely necessary; use the hub to manage inter-spoke traffic. 4. Performance and Cost Optimization An efficient Hub-and-Spoke design ensures minimal latency and optimized costs. ✅ Use Accelerated Networking on VMs to enhance throughput and reduce network latency. ✅ Implement Azure Route Server to dynamically manage routes between the hub and spokes. ✅ Monitor network traffic with Azure Monitor and Traffic Analytics to detect bottlenecks and optimize network flow. ✅ Optimize ExpressRoute or VPN usage by choosing the right SKU based on bandwidth and redundancy needs. Tip: Reduce unnecessary traffic through NSG rules and route tables to avoid extra processing costs. 5. Governance and Automation To maintain consistency and reduce human errors, use automation and governance best practices: ✅ Deploy infrastructure as code (IaC) using ARM templates, Bicep, or Terraform for reproducible deployments. ✅ Enforce security policies with Azure Policy to ensure compliance with networking standards. ✅ Use Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to define strict access levels for managing network resources. ✅ Monitor and log network activity using Azure Sentinel and Azure Monitor to detect anomalies. Tip: Automate network provisioning using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions for efficiency and consistency. Final Thoughts A well-designed Hub-and-Spoke architecture in Azure provides centralized security, simplified management, and scalable connectivity. However, to maximize its benefits, it's essential to carefully plan network security, routing, and cost optimization while leveraging Azure’s built-in automation and monitoring tools. 🔹 What challenges have you faced when implementing a Hub-and-Spoke model in Azure? 🔹 What best practices have worked well for your organization? Let’s discuss in the comments! 🚀How are schemas used and defined in Azure and wih Azure Data Studio?
I had thought that a database schema was the name of the structure on which tables are interconnected by primary keys and foreign keys. But in the tool, Azure Data Studio, the user is asked to select from a pre-defined set of schemas when creating a table. What is more is that when setting up or createing a database through Azure, we are given the opportuniityh to use a sample database and this is where "SalesLT" comes from and so there must be some place where we can define a schema with Azure Data Studio. Where would that be? It was generated when deciding to use a demo sample database. So there must be some way, using SQL code or otherwise, to generate a schema.
Leverage Azure PIM with DataBricks with Contributor role privilege
We are trying to leverage Azure PIM. This works great for most things, however; we've run into a snag. We want to limit the contributor role to a group and only at the resource group level, not subscription. We wish to elevate via PIM. This will then allow the user access within DataBricks. #1 issue - We have to enable PIM at the group level as it doesn't show up for group members within PIM and can't assign a contributor level group within the PIM application in Azure. So an admin has to enable PIM for the user to activate at the group level. We've also tried to do this scenario leveraging the Managed Application Contributor role as well. #2 - Delay - We are using the SCIM connector for User Provisioning leveraging Azure AD Groups. This connects to the unity catalog and are able to assign the groups within the Workspace. The issue - after you elevate the users permission in the contributor group at the resource level, you have to wait for 40 minutes for user provisioning to run or stop/start it. Until then, the user remains in an 'inactive' state within DataBricks. We feel we are missing a more fluid way to grant these rights and leverage PIM. Suggestions? Thanks in advance.Using sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint to call Graph API from Azure SQL
I've been using sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint to call external APIs and for the most part it works great. But I'm having some challenges calling Graph. One option I've used to call Graph is to have something external generate the access token and then pass that in the headers. Headers are limited to 4000 characters. That works great in my one environment where the access tokens are less than 4000 characters. But in another environment, they are greater than 4000 characters. I tried creating a credential for the access token but the secret in a credential is also limited to 4000 characters! I also tried using a user managed identity. I set up everything right, gave the enterprise app permissions to Graph, and it looks like the identity is being used, but I keep getting an "Access token validation failure. Invalid audience." error. I guess I need to set the audience/scope somewhere but I don't know how or where. It seems like sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint should allow longer headers, or credentials should allow longer secrets. 🙂 Any suggestions?Azure Architecture Well-Architected framework
Learn how to plan for an outage and anticipate failure in your workload! https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-architecture-blog/planning-for-an-outage-here-is-how-to-anticipate-failure-in-your/ba-p/3295770 What do you do to keep your services going 24x7? Do you use the Microsoft Well-Architected framework as a baseline?
I wonder how Azure architecture works (Azure uses nested virtualization to provide service?)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/security/fundamentals/isolation-choices#next-steps Azure’s compute platform is based on machine virtualization—meaning that all customer code executes in a Hyper-V virtual machine. On each Azure node (or network endpoint), there is a Hypervisor that runs directly over the hardware and divides a node into a variable number of Guest Virtual Machines (VMs). Each node also has one special Root VM, which runs the Host OS. A critical boundary is the isolation of the root VM from the guest VMs and the guest VMs from one another, managed by the hypervisor and the root OS. The hypervisor/root OS pairing leverages Microsoft's decades of operating system security experience, and more recent learning from Microsoft's Hyper-V, to provide strong isolation of guest VMs. According to the explanation above, I drew a simple structure that I understand from it. Then where is a hypervisor for a root vm??? Does Azure uses nested hypervisor? Like this picture?New Blog Post | Study Guide for AZ-305: Part 3–Design a solution to log and monitor Azure resources
New Blog Post | Study Guide for AZ-305: Part 3–Design a solution to log and monitor Azure resources Hello friends! This is the continuation (Part 3/12) of blog post series to help you get ready for the latest AZ-305 exam. What is the Monitoring ? The monitoring is a skill and not a full-time job. In today’s world of cloud-based architectures that are implemented through DevOps projects, developers, SREs, and operations staff must collectively define an effective cloud monitoring and logging strategy. This strategy should focus on identifying when service-level objectives (SLOs) and service-level agreements (SLAs) are not being met, likely negatively affecting the user experience. >> Check the rest of the post at #cloudmarathoner : https://thecloudmarathoner.com/index.php/2022/02/19/study-guide-for-az-305-part-3-design-a-solution-to-log-and-monitor-azure-resources/ Please, check out the blog link above and let me know your feedback. Thanks! Elkhan
