 Hey everybody, it's September and time for another episode of Wired for Hybrid, your favorite show on what's new in Azure Networking. Today, it is my honor to have on our show again, my teammate Dong Ao, who covers Azure Front Door, and so he's going to help us out today. Stay tuned for everything and what's new in Azure Networking on this episode of Wired for Hybrid. Thank you for having me, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here again. Absolutely. It's great to have you as well. I appreciate you coming in. We had an opportunity. Pierre is out of the office for a little bit. I had a couple of things on Azure Front Door. You've been on with us before. I figured it would be a perfect opportunity for you to come and give us some of your subject matter expert information on Azure Front Door. Yeah, absolutely. Let's see. It looks like on my list here, I have about three things for us to talk about that just came out recently. Let's go ahead and just dive in and get started here. Absolutely. All right. The first thing I have on my list here is Azure Front Door's integration with inside the storage account service. Well, actually, we have this capability before with the Azure CDN service, but now we have incorporated Azure Front Door into it, where from within the storage account resource, under security and networking, you can actually create an endpoint for Front Door. Well, technically, you can create an Azure profile from there as well. You can also actually, with inside that, you can also use an existing Azure Front Door profile and create an endpoint that allows connectivity to your storage account resources. The reason why this came about is there's been a lot asked about how Azure Front Door can be integrated with a lot of different services. One of the services that a lot of our customers use is storage accounts, and they want to be able to connect to their storage account privately from the Azure Front Door resource. So why not integrate it into the storage account resource itself, where it allows you to manage that particular endpoint, where you can configure the custom domain that you want to connect to the storage account from, Ward 2, sorry, and then configure the type of skew that you want for the Azure Front Door, whether you're customers to just access the storage account, or you want to provide some security by upgrading your Azure Front Door to the premium tier, which allows you to see all sorts of reporting, and once it configures certain types of, as I'm just losing that term, the WAF security rules, the custom security rules. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah, that's great to hear. Traditionally, we think of those content distribution networks as just something that distributes a web page or something else like that, and makes it more readily available. It's cool that especially when I talk to people all the time, Azure Storage is something everybody's used in, and so it's great to hear that we're integrating storage with Front Door to provide that functionality for working with the storage through there. Very cool. What else you got for me on Front Door? Let's see. The next thing I have is we finally have Azure Front Door available for our Azure Government customers. Very cool. One of the major Azure Government customers, I know we've been a little bit slow on reaching out to those customers, but now it's readily available. Not all the features are currently available, so think about it as, for example, the feature that we just released with the storage account integration, we probably won't be seeing that readily available for our Azure Gov customer. At least for another six months, that's usually how it is for a lot of our Azure services. That goes GA for our Gov customer. It's usually a little bit delay just because there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff that has to be taken care of in terms of regulations and things like that, but it's great that our Azure Gov customer can now also utilize the features that we currently have in Azure Front Door. That's awesome. I knew there was usually a, when something releases GA for our commercial customers, that it usually takes some time to get over to government, but it's good to know that it's sometimes like a six to nine month, and that's probably good for our customers to know too as well, that if they are working in Gov, that we are working to get those all taken care of, and I can only imagine the different hoops and stuff that they have to jump through, to get stuff to work and meeting all the regulations, security regulations and not that security isn't important for commercial. It's just, as you know, it's just different in government that the Cloud's a little bit different. But so definitely great that we have that coming along, and I think you had one more for us today. Yes, I do. The last one here is bring your own certificate for custom domain. So we've always had this available. Basically, when you're configuring a custom domain for your Azure Front Door profile, you can either configure it with a managed certificate, which is done by us in Azure, or you can bring your own certificate and you install that onto your keyboard, and then you allow Azure Front Door to access it. Well, one of the things that happens when we set up a custom domain is there has to be some validation that's done and that requires an extra step from our customers where they have to create a TXT file inside their domain register in order for that validation to happen. So now that validation is actually done automatically for you, instead of the manual process of creating the TXT, as long as the domain name matches the certificate that is being uploaded, we will validate that and approve that and get you past that point in the validation process. Oh, that's pretty cool. On the side, I've set up here and there a number of domains inside of Azure, and I can always remember going through the steps of having to do the TXT file and stuff like that. So it's cool with this that it takes the certificate, the valid certificate matches it together and makes it a bit easier for customers. Not that that TXT step is all that hard, but I can tell you I've had times where it didn't seem to pick up as quickly as I wanted it to. Maybe that was me, but that's a great update to have and I'm sure everybody's going to be happy about that as being able to put their certificates up there. So one thing I wanted to mention to everybody is, as always, all of our documentation is available for you to take a look at, and we will have in the show notes down below, we'll have links to all of the updates that we're covering today, along with references for you to use to get to know more about both Azure Front Door, and what I'm going to talk about next is just a couple of things with Azure Firewall. So one of the things that we just had come out for general availability with Azure Firewall is the ability to upgrade and downgrade standard and premium SKUs with a click of a button. So this is pretty cool because you can do it in the portal. It's super easy. You go into your firewall, there's a change skew, it goes to another screen. It gives you the option of if you want to upgrade your Azure Firewall policy to the premium policy version, you can do that. I found it took about 12 or 15 minutes to do that, and then it was upgraded and now you've got access to all of those features. And you can do the same thing in reverse. So let's say you moved to premium and you decide as a company, you don't need all of those features. You can go through the same process and downgrade. One thing to keep in mind with this is a couple of things. First, you can't do this for basic. So there's no easy click up going from basic or down to basic. The other thing is that if when you say when you upgraded to standard or when you deployed your firewall with a premium policy, if you try to go in and there's a premium policy attached to that firewall, it won't allow you to downgrade it until you switch that policy to a standard policy. So that's an important thing for you to keep in mind if you're going to run through this. But I think this is just another one of those ways. We talk about this on the show all the time where we're not necessarily putting out big brand new things all the time. There's not big services that are rolling out, but we're constantly listening to our customers about, hey, this would make my life easier. So this is one of those things that I would guess they've probably had hundreds of not thousands of customers that have mentioned, hey, can you make it easier to upgrade and downgrade these? And so we've added that in there for you. So I think that'll be well received. Yeah, I can't believe, well, this little feature is going to save a lot of time, right, because in order for us before, I believe we had to delete and then recreate, or not delete and recreate, but we'll have to create a new one and that takes some time and you have to reconfigure it all over again. So that takes quite some time to work for you to do. Now, from what you're saying, it takes about 10, 12 minutes for an upgrade to happen. How do we need to plan some kind of scheduled downtime for this for that 10 or 12 minutes? That is a great question. So we do absolutely recommend that when you're doing this, that you do it on off hours because there is there is going to be some, you know, changing of the proverbial guard there. I'm not sure exactly if it's just like you're completely wide open at that point or if it's, you know, what have you. But as with anything, you know, we live in a, you know, a 24 by 7 I.T. world these days where, you know, people are shipping all the time. But, you know, when it comes to your firewalls and stuff like that, this is probably something to good to do middle of the night weekend. Kind of when, you know, you as far as your company goes is a little bit slower. That was a great, great call out. I remember going across that in the docs, but forgot to mention it. So thanks there. The other thing that we have going, which is super cool as well, is Azure Firewall is now generally available for the Poland central region. So that's pretty cool because it continues to expand out these features to our other customers across the world. You know, we've got the we've got most of our core services available in most of our regions, but we aren't able to roll those out right away all the time when we go into those regions. Probably very much like, you know, Don, you were talking about before talking about Azure Front Door and rolling to the U.S. government, getting those updates out there. Very much the same thing when we're going to these different regions, you know, especially many of them have different, you know, they have regulations as far as, you know, data sovereignty and, you know, all of those sorts of things that, you know, it takes a while for these to get rolled out, but this is moving out to Poland central and we'll include a link as well for you to take a look and see which of the regions currently host the Azure Firewall, just in case you're wondering if it's hosted in the ones that you're working with. That's awesome. That's awesome that we have another region added to the bucket list here. I'm glad to hear that we're getting more people involved into our, our availability for the people in those particular regions. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, hey, Don, I appreciate you coming out today. You know, this is a busy time of year for all of us because we've got Microsoft Ignite right around the corner second week of November. So I know, you know, with me, I've got some services that have some stuff going on and you probably do as well. So we can definitely expect in future episodes of Wired for Hybrid to have more as some of those updates are coming out. And maybe we can get Don to come back and do a update or a continuation of the deep dive that he did back with us in the spring. That deep dive on Azure Front Door, which was a really, really cool episode. We'll have the link to that as well, so you can check that out if you haven't. All right. Thank you for having me, Michael. Absolutely. Take care, everybody.