AWS Direct Connect allows physical connections and BGP setup to connect AWS cloud with on-premise DC or customer's private cloud. I wonder if there's anything like this in MS Azure cloud. Not VPN based..
Kind-of.
It is announced as a future plan to support, but not yet accessible to customers. I believe this is what you are asking for: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/sep13/09-18msattpr.aspx
Hopefully we can see this announcements moving forward in the next year. Offering this solution to regions other than USA will also be interesting development of this solution, but currently nothing can be found on the internet.
As the cloud continues to be embraced by customers and partners around the world we are seeking to help them connect to their off-premise investments. Today, providers such as TW Telecom, AT&T, and Level 3 grant their clients the ability to connect to AWS or Windows Azure with scalable and flexible connectivity. Recently, Level 3 released ExpressRoute; a new service that allows customers to utilize a private connection from an Equinox Data Center to the Windows Azure Cloud. This service is similar in nature to the AWS direct connect service that was released a few years ago, providing a private network route to hosted cloud services that bypasses the public Internet.
ExpressRoute aims to reduce latency, and increase the speed in which clients can access their applications. To achieve this goal, Level 3 provides the client with 1 gigabit or 10 gigabit connection from an Equinox Data Center in San Jose to Windows Azure increasing your network throughput for large workloads. Today, Windows Azure does not offer multiple VPN’s into their cloud. To compensate for this issue, consolidating and connecting to the Azure cloud with a private connection ensures the transfer of your data.
Ref. from http://fastblue.com/cloud-connectivity-aws-direct-connect-and-windows-azure-express-route/
Related
I'm using the Hybrid Connection Manager and also the On Premise Data Gateway for several projects hosted in the Azure cloud.
There are more and more use cases for those two components and I need to setup a clean monitoring to detect connection troubles (for example when there is a network issue or a reboot of the servers hosting the gateways).
For the HCM, there are Relays metrics I can rely on, but I saw that some of those counters are not reliable. I had issues with my connexion in the past few days, and when I check the ListenerConnections-ClientError or ListenerConnections-ServerError counters, they always equal to 0... this sounds very strange?
Regarding the OnPremise Data Gateway, I think that because it also relies on SBus Relay, I should probably use the same metrics?
I am creating a WebService with C# Core 3.0 that is using MySQL and Redis, but I am not so familiar with Azure so I need advice about configuring everything.
I had MySQL hosted on AWS, but I am transferring it to Azure because I think that performance (speed) will be better on Azure because they will be on same data center. Right?
But, on my MySQL page Host is like '*.mysql.database.azure.com'. That means that every connection will go out of Azure, and than come back? I don't have some local IP for connection? Same question for Redis.
Do I need to configure some local network on Azure and will that impact speed on the app? And, is MySQL a good choice for Azure or should I try with another one?
I am just reading about Azure Virtual Networks. But as I understand it, VN's sole purpose is to isolate elements from the outside network?
You will get better performance if your my-sql instance and your app service are in the same region (basically the same data centre).
The connection string is mysql.database.azure.com, but remember the connection will be a TCP/IP connection, so the DNS lookup will realise that this address mysql.database.azure.com is in the same region (same data center). Then the TCP/IP connection will go to an internal IP.
You could use tcpping in your app service's kudo console to try this and see the result.
The basic rule is that you should group your app and database in the same region for better performance and cheaper cost (as Microsoft doesn't charge traffic within the same region).
Azure Virtual network is for a different purpose. For example, if you have some on premise database servers and you want to call these servers from azure, then VM could be helpful. But for the scenario you described, it is not really needed.
The company I work for has Microsoft azure support included, and if you or your company have support contract with them, you can raise questions directly to them and get really quick responses.
Is it okay to use a single Azure Expressroute connection for both Office 365 and Cloud Infrastructure migration? My customer is moving towards O365, and later probably next year they will start moving their infrastructure assets including their developer workstations to Azure IaaS. Customer is concerned about the public internet based communication and wants to implement a secure and faster communication channel. However, I understand that just for O365 Expressroute maybe an overkill, but considering the longer term plans, I can safely suggest Expressroute. So, my questions are:
A single Expressoute connection can handle both O365 and Cloud
Infra migration?
Is there a difference in the type of circuits used for O365 and
Cloud Infra?
I would think that you can easily accomplish that depending, on how much bandwidth you are piping through the ExpressRoute
ExpressRoute for Azure and for Office365, all run off the same hardware / circuits as far as i can recall.
Great diagram for Azure ExpressRoute for O365:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/azure-expressroute-for-office-365-6d2534a2-c19c-4a99-be5e-33a0cee5d3bd?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US
Important to note:
Some connections such as Public DNS and Content Delivery Network nodes
still require the public internet connection. Also the
users who are not located in their ExpressRoute connected
building are connecting over the Internet.
1) For sure you could use a single ExpressRoute circuit. Circuits are available with speeds from 50 Mb to 10 Gb- speeds and prices: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/pricing/details/expressroute/.
2) Initially, i would suggest just signing up for Microsoft peering. This will allow you to configure Route Filters with the BGP Communities relevant to Office 365 and your use case- like Exchange Online (to move mailboxes). If you work with your Microsoft account manager/TAM to get approval for Azure AD as well, you can move authentication via the BGP Community "Other Office 365 Services".
I would stress though that Office 365 is designed to work over the public internet. Most customers i've worked with in the past migrated 100's of Gb's worth of mail over the public internet with no issue at all, averaging 5-10 Gb data of uploads per hour on 100 Mb WAN links contended with general internet traffic.
I have an OnPremise (SAP) system which exposes data via RESTful services and remote functions (RFC). How can I access these data from a Node.JS application running on AWS? Which AWS service will be useful in this scenario to connect to the OnPremise VPN to facilitate the connection?
You need to make use of AWS Direct Connect to extend your on premise infrastructure with AWS.
There are two solutions for VPN connections: either a site-to-site VPN, which uses a customer gateway and a virtual private gateway. Alternatively, AWS Direct Connect is an actual physical connection between your on premise data center and an AWS data center.
DirectConnect offers much better performance, but requires third parties to install a physical cable, and so can take several days to implement. If you're looking for a solution that's independent of hardware, then a site-to-site VPN could be a good fit.
We are on the process of choosing a Cloud provider to run our VMs, and we would like to better understand the differences between AWS and the new Azure.
Does anyone know if Azure Cloud (IaaS) have an equivalent for the AWS Route53 and Elastic Load Balancer?
If it has, how does it work? Do they also have several different zones across the globe capable of providing High-Availability with minimum impact on the latency?
Thank you
Microsoft doesn't have a DNS service like Route53. But does support common DNS operations such as c-name routing/forwarding to various Windows Azure services. As for zones, there are currently 8 locations that MSFT offers for hosting of Windows Azure, 2 in Europe, 2 in Asia, 4 in the US, and Fujistsu offers hosting of some Windows Azure services in Japan. With the possible exception of Fujitsu (I don't know the details of their SLA), all Windows Azure Services are at least 99.9% (the definition of "highly available" is subjective). Additionally, Microsoft has the Content Delivery Network with more than 24 nodes spread across the globe to help speed delivery and reduce the latency of content being delivered to almost any geography.
For the most part yes, there is equivalence. Windows Azure has always had a load balancer on any external endpoint (exposed over the VIP). It is not a super programmable firewall at this point (you cannot do more than simply remove yourself from rotation), but it works very well for web farm scenarios.
Cloud Traffic Manager works very well for geo-locating your services in Windows Azure. Just deploy your service in multiple datacenters, configure a few settings in traffic manager, and you are done. Most folks use it for 'best performance' (i.e. closest DC to customer), but also you can use it for 'failover'.
In terms of DNS, there is no equivalent service today for handling external DNS names. You handle DNS today with your own servers. That is one point where AWS is ahead.