Networking and Infrastructure Connectivity

Networking is where distributed systems either work or fail, and the failure modes are rarely intuitive. A connection refused on port 443 looks identical whether the cause is a missing DNS record, an NSG rule that closed last Tuesday, a SNAT port exhaustion under load, or a Private Endpoint registered in the wrong zone. The articles in this collection cover the networking decisions that lock in architectural constraints — usually permanently — long before the consequences surface in production.

Azure Kubernetes Service networking is a recurring focus because the choices made at cluster creation cannot be changed afterward without rebuilding. kubenet, Azure CNI, and Azure CNI Overlay each carry distinct trade-offs around IP address consumption, pod-to-pod routing, and integration with the rest of the Azure VNet. The kubenet 400-node ceiling, classic CNI’s appetite for VNet IP space, and CNI Overlay’s pragmatic combination of efficiency with enterprise capabilities are covered with the decision criteria named explicitly.

Multi-cluster topologies introduce a second class of problems. Hub-spoke routing, VNet peering, cross-cluster DNS resolution, and shared ingress patterns become operational concerns the moment a second cluster exists for regional resiliency, team isolation, or compliance boundaries. The articles document what teams can actually operate at 2 AM versus what looks elegant on a whiteboard.

Network policies and Zero Trust get specific attention because the default AKS posture is permissive. Pod-to-pod traffic flows freely until a NetworkPolicy resource closes it; most clusters never deploy one. The articles cover practical policy design that does not break observability tooling, ingress controllers, or cross-namespace service discovery.

A final cluster addresses the network isolation patterns that compliance frameworks demand. Azure SQL exposed to the public internet by default, Storage Accounts with permissive firewalls, and the Private Endpoint plus VNet integration patterns that ISO 27017 and similar standards effectively require are documented with the configuration that survives an audit.

Your TLS Config is Probably Wrong: Five Audit Failures I Keep Finding

Production systems with HTTP endpoints wide open and TLS 1.0 enabled for backward compatibility that died in 2020 are still everywhere. If auditors haven’t flagged your encryption config yet, they will. This guide shows the fatal configurations that fail security audits and the Azure Front Door patterns that actually pass.

Multi-AKS Cluster Networking & Hub-Spoke Topology

Running more than one AKS cluster changes networking from a setup task into an operating model. This guide covers practical connectivity patterns, hub-spoke routing, cross-cluster DNS, ingress options, and decision criteria that help teams scale safely without adding complexity too early.

Your Azure SQL Is Public Right Now. ISO 27017 Demands You Fix It

That SQL Server you deployed last week? Publicly accessible. That Storage Account? Same story. Azure defaults are security theater. ISO 27017 calls this a compliance violation, and your next audit will too. Stop trusting “cloud-native” to mean “secure” and start implementing VNets, Private Endpoints, and NSGs before your data becomes someone else’s problem.

AKS Network Policies: The Security Layer Your Cluster Is Missing

Network segmentation is a fundamental security control for modern Kubernetes environments. AKS supports multiple networking models such as kubenet, Azure CNI, and overlay CNIs. The networking model matters, but the decisive factor for enforcing isolation and compliance is the consistent application of network policies.

This article describes how network policies work in AKS, the available engines, practical examples, and recommended practices for enforcing a zero-trust posture within a cluster.

AKS Networking Clash: kubenet vs. CNI vs. CNI Overlay

Selecting the right network model is arguably one of the most critical architectural decisions you will make when deploying a Kubernetes cluster on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This choice ripples through nearly every aspect of your cluster’s lifecycle, influencing how pods communicate, how efficiently you use your IP address space, which Azure services integrate seamlessly with your workloads, and ultimately, how well your infrastructure scales to meet future demands. It affects scalability, security posture, operational cost, performance characteristics, available integration options, and your long-term operational flexibility.