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.