Tag: Firewall

Azure WAF and False Positives

This post will explain how to override false positives in the (network) Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF), without compromising security, using one of four methods in combination with a tiered WAF Policy architecture:

  1. Managed Rulesets
  2. Custom Rules
  3. Exclusions
  4. Disabled rules

False Positives

A WAF is a rather simple solution, attempting to inspect L7 (application layer) traffic and intercept attacks such as protocol misuse, SQL injection, or cross-site scripting. Unfortunately, false positives can occur.

For example, let’s assume that an API app is securely shared using a WAF. Messages sent to the API might be formatted in JSON, with lots of special characters to format the message. SQL Inspection defenses count special characters, trying to find where an attacker is trying to escape out of a web request to create a database command that will execute. If the defense counts too many special characters (it will!) then an alert will be created and the message will be blocked if Prevention mode is enabled.

One must allow that traffic through because it is expected traffic that the application (and the business) requires. But one must do this without opening up too many holes in the WAF, making the WAF a costly, pointless existence.

Log Analytics Ingestion Charge

There is a side effect to false positives. False positives will vastly outnumber actual attack/probing attempts. Busy workloads can generate huge amounts of logs for false positives. If you use Log Analytics, that data has a cost:

  • Storage: Not too bad
  • Ingestion: This one is painful

The way to reduce the cost is to reduce the noise by overriding the detections that create false positives. Organizations that have a lot of web traffic could save a significant amount of money here.

WAF Policies

The WAF functionality of the Azure Application Gateway (AppGw) is managed by a resource called an Application Gateway WAF Policy (WAF Policy). The typical approach is to associate 1 WAF Policy with a WAF resource. The WAF policy will create customizations. For reasons that should become apparent later, I am going to urge you to take a slightly more granular approach to manage your WAF if your WAF is used to securely share more than one workload or listener:

  • WAF parent policy: A WAF policy will be associated with the WAF. This policy will apply to the WAF and all listeners unless another WAF Policy overrides specific settings.
  • Per-Listener/Per-Workload policy: This is a policy that is created specifically for a listener or a workload (a set of listeners). Any customisations that apply only to a listener or a workload will be applied here, without affecting any other listener or workload.

Methodology

You will never know what false positives you will encounter. If your WAF goes straight into Prevention mode then you will create a world of pain and be the recipient of a lot of hate-messages/emails.

Here’s the approach that I recommend:

  1. Protect your WAF with an NSG that has Traffic Analytics enabled. The NSG should only allow the necessary HTTP, HTTPS, WAF monitoring (from Azure), and load balancing traffic. Use a custom deny-all rule to block everything else.
  2. Enable monitoring for the Application Gateway, sending all logs to a queryable destination such as Log Analytics.
  3. Monitor traffic for a period of time – enough to allow expected normal usage of the full systems. Your monitoring should detect the false positives.
  4. Verify that Traffic Analytics did not record malicious IP addresses hitting your WAF.
  5. Query your monitoring data to find the false positives for each listener. Identify the hostname, request URI, ruleset, rule group, and rule ID that is causing the issue on a per-listener/workload basis.
  6. Ideally, developers fix any issues that create false positives but this is unlikely – so we’ll move on.
  7. Determine your override strategy (see below).
  8. Deploy your overrides with the policies still in Detection mode.
  9. Monitor traffic for another period of time to ensure that there are no more false positives.
  10. Switch the parent policy to Prevention Mode.
  11. Swith each per-listener/per-workload policy to Prevention Mode
  12. Monitor

Managed Rule Sets

The WAF today has two rulesets that you can use:

  • OWASP: Used to detect attacks such as SQL Injection, Cross-site scripting, and so on.
  • Microsoft Bot Manager Rule Set: Used to prevent malicious bots from browsing/attacking your workloads.

You need the OWASP ruleset – but we will need to manage it (later). The bot ruleset, in my experience, creates a huge amount of noise will no way of creating granular overrides. One can override the bot ruleset using custom rules, but as you’ll see later, that’s a big stick that is not granular at all!

My approach to this is to disable the Microsoft Bot Manager Rule Set (or leave it disabled) in the parent and child rulesets. If I have a need to enable it somewhere, I can do it in a per-listener or per-workload ruleset.

Custom Rules

A custom rule is created in a WAF Policy to force traffic that matches certain criteria to be:

  • Always allowed
  • Always denied
  • Logged only without denying it

You can create a sequence of filters based on:

  • IP Address
  • Number
  • String
  • Geo Location

If the set of filters matches a request then your desired action will apply. For example, if I want to force traffic to be allowed to my API, I can enter the API URI as one of the filters (as above) and all traffic will be allowed.

Yes, all traffic will be allowed, including traffic that is not a false positive. If I only had a few OWASP rules that were blocking the traffic, the custom rule would disable all OWASP rules.

If you must use this approach, then implement it in the child policy so it is limited to the associated listener/workload.

Exclusions

This is the newest of the override types in WAF Policy – and I’ve found it to be the least useful.

The theory is that you can create an exclusion for one or more OWASP rules based on the values of request headers. For example, if a header called RequestHeaderKeys contains a value of X-Scanner you can instruct the affected OWASP rules to be disabled. This sounds really powerful and quite granular. But this starts to fall apart with other scenarios, such as the aforementioned SQL Injection.

Another common rule that alerts on or blocks traffic is Missing User Agent Header. Exclusions work on the value of a header, so if the header is missing, Exclusions cannot evaluate it.

Another gotcha is that you cannot combine header filters to create an exclusion. The Azure Portal experience for creating an Exclusion makes it look like you can. However, the result is two or more Exclusions that work independently.

If Exclusions will work for you, implement them in the per-listener/per-workload policy and specify only the rules that must be overridden. This approach will limit the effect of the exclusion:

  1. The scope is just the listener/workload that is associated with the WAF Policy.
  2. The scope is further limited to just requests where the header matches, allowing all other requests and all OWASP rules to be applied.

Disabled Rules

The final approach that you can use is to disable rules that are creating false positive alerts. A simple workload might only require one or two rules to be disabled. An older & larger workload might require many OWASP rules to be disabled!

If you are going to disable OWASP rules, then do it in the per-listener/per-workload policy. This will limit the effect of the changes to that listener/workload.

This is a fairly each approach and it is pretty granular – not as much as Exclusions. The downside is that you are completely disabling certain protections for an entire listener/workload, leaving the workload vulnerable to attacks of those previously protected types.

Combinations

If you have the time and the data, you can combine different approaches. For example:

  • A webhook that comes from the same IP address all of the time can be allowed via a Custom Rule based on an IP Address filter. Any other traffic will be subject to the fill defenses of the WAF.
  • If you have certain headers that must be allowed and you want to enable all other protections for all other traffic then use Exclusions.
  • If traffic can come from anywhere and you need to override OWASP rules, then disable those rules.

No Great Solution

In summary, there is no perfect solution. The best you can do is find the correct override solution for the specific false positive and deploy it to a specific listener or workload. This will limit the holes that you create in the WAF to the absolute minimum while enabling your workloads to function.

Azure Firewall Basic – For Small/Medium Business & “Branch”

Microsoft has just announced a lower cost SKU of Azure Firewall, Basic, that is aimed at small/medium business but could also play a role in “branch office” deployments in Microsoft Azure.

Standard & Premium

Azure Firewall launched with a Standard SKU several years ago. The Standard SKU offered a lot of features, but some things deemed necessary for security were missing: IDPS and TLS Inspection were top of the list. Microsoft added a Premium SKU that added those features as well as fuller web category inspection and URL filtering (not just FQDN).

However, some customers didn’t adopt Azure Firewall because of the price. A lot of those customers were small-medium businesses (SMBs). Another scenario that might be affected is a “branch office” in an Azure region – a smaller footprint that is closer to clients that isn’t a main deployment.

Launching The Basic SKU

Microsoft has been working on a lower cost SKU for quite a while. The biggest challenge, I think, that they faced was trying to figure out how to balance feature, performance, and availability with price. They know that the target market has a finite budget, but there are necessary feature requirements. Every customer is different, so I guess when face with this conundrum, one needs to satisfy the needs of 80% of customers.

The clues for a new SKU have been publicly visible for quite a while – the ARM reference for Azure Firewall documented that a Basic SKU existed somewhere in Azure (in private preview). Tonight, Microsoft launched the Basic SKU inpublic Preview. A longer blog post adds some details.

Introducing the Azure Firewall

The primary target market for the Basic SKU hasn’t deployed a firewall appliance of any kind in Azure – if they are in Azure then they are most likely only using NSGs for security – which operates only at the transport protocol (TCP, UDP, ICMP) layer in a decentralised way.

The Azure Firewall is a firewall appliance, allowing centralised control. It should be deployed with NSGs and resource firewalls for layered protection, and where there is a zero-trust configuration (deny all by default) in all directions, even inside of a workload.

The Azure Firewall is native to Microsoft Azure – you don’t need a third party license or support contract. It is fully deployable and configured as code (ARM, Bicep, Terraform, Pulumi, etc), making it ideal for DevSecOps. Azure Firewall is much easier to learn than NVAs because the firewall is easily available through an Azure subscription and the training (Microsoft Learn) is publicly available – not hidden behind classic training paywalls. Thanks to the community and a platform model, I expect that more people are learning Azure Firewall than any other kind of firewall today – skills are in short supply so using native tech that is easy to learn and many are learning just makes sense.

Comparing Azure Basic With Standard and Premium

Microsoft helpfully put together a table to compare the 3 SKUs:

Comparing Azure Firewall Basic with Standard and Premium

Another difference with the Basic SKU is that you must deploy the AzureFirewallManagementSubnet in addition to the AzureFirewallSubnet – this additional subnet is often associated with forced tunneling. The result is that the firewall will have a second public IP address that is used only for management tasks.

Pricing

The Basic SKU follows the same price model as the higher SKUs: a base compute cost and a data processing cost. The shared pricing is for the Preview so it is subject to change.

The Basic SKU base compute (deployment) cost is €300.03 per month in West Europe. That’s less than 1/3 of the cost of the Standard SKU at €947.54 per month. The data processing cost for the Basic SKU is higher at €0.068 per GB. However, the amount of data passing through such a firewall deployment will be much lower so it probably will not be a huge add-on.

Preview Deployment Error

At this time, the Basic SKU is in preview. You must enable the preview in your subscription. If you do not do this, your deployment will fail with this error:

“code”: “FirewallPolicyMissingRequiredFeatureAllowBasic”,

“message”: “Subscription ‘someGuid’ is missing required feature ‘Microsoft.Network/AzureFirewallBasic’ for Basic policies.”

Some Interesting Notes

I’ve not had a chance to do much work with the Basic SKU – work is pretty crazy lately. But here are two things to note:

  • A hub & spoke deployment is still recommended, even for SMBs.
  • Availability zones are supported for higher availability.
  • You are forced to use Azure Firewall Manager/Azure Firewall Policy – this is a good thing because newer features are only in the new management plane.

Final Thoughts

The new SKU of Azure Firewall should add new customers to this service. I also expect that larger enterprises will also be interested – not every deployment needs the full blown Standard/Premium deployment but some form of firewall is still required.

Enabling DevSecOps with Azure Firewall

In this post, I will share how you can implement DevSecOps with Azure Firewall, with links to a bunch of working Bicep files to deploy the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates.

This example uses a “legacy” hub and spoke – one where the hub is VNet-based and not based on Azure Virtual WAN Hub. I’ll try to find some time to work on the code for that one.

The Concept

Hold on, because there’s a bunch of things to understand!

DevSecOps

The DevSecOps methodology is more than just IaC. It’s a combination of people, processes, and technology to enable a fail-fast agile delivery of workloads/applications to the business. I discussed here how DevSecOps can be used to remove the friction of IT to deliver on the promises of the Cloud.

The Azure features that this design is based on are discussed in concept here. The idea is that we want to enable Devs/Ops/Security to manage firewall rules in the workload’s Git repository (repo). This breaks the traditional model where the rules are located in a central location. The important thing is not the location of the rules, but the processes that manage the rules (change control through Git repo pull request reviews) and who (the reviewers, including the architects, firewall admins, security admins, etc).

So what we are doing is taking the firewall rules for the workload and placing them in with the workload’s code. NSG rules are probably already there. Now, we’re putting the Azure Firewall rules for the workload in the workload repo too. This is all made possible thanks to changes that were made to Azure Firewall Policy (Azure Firewall Manager) Rules Collection Groups – I use one Rules Collection Group for each workload and all the rules that enable that workload are placed in that Rules Collection Group. No changes will make it to the trunk branch (deployment action/pipelines look for changes here to trigger a deployment) without approval by all the necessary parties – this means that the firewall admins are still in control, but they don’t necessarily need to write the rules themselves … and the devs/operators might even write the rules, subject to review!

This is the killer reason to choose Azure Firewall over NVAs – the ability to not only deploy the firewall resource, but to manage the entire configuration and rule sets as code, and to break that all out in a controlled way to make the enterprise more agile.

Other Bits

If you’ve read my posts on Azure routing (How to Troubleshoot Azure Routing? and BGP with Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks & Firewalls) then you’ll understand that there’s more going on than just firewall rules. Packets won’t magically flow through your firewall just because it’s in the middle of your diagram!

The spoke or workload will also need to deploy:

  • A peering connection to the hub, enabling connectivity with the hub and the firewall. All traffic leaving the spoke will route through the firewall thanks to a user-defined route in the spoke subnet route table. Peering is a two-way connection. The workload will include some bicep to deploy the spoke-hub and the hub-spoke connections.
  • A route for the GatewaySubnet route table in the hub. This is required to route traffic to the spoke address prefix(es) through the Azure Firewall so on-premises>spoke traffic is correctly inspected and filtered by the firewall.

The IaC

In this section, I’ll explain the code layout and placement.

My Code

You can find my public repo, containing all the Bicep code here. Please feel free to download and use.

The Git Repo Design

You will have two Git repos:

  1. The first repo is for the hub. This repo will contain the code for the hub, including:
    • The hub VNet.
    • The Hub VNet Gateway.
    • The GatewaySubnet Route Table.
    • The Azure Firewall.
    • The Azure Firewall Policy that manages the Azure Firewall.
  2. The second repo is for the spoke. This skeleton example workload contains:

Action/Pipeline Permissions

I have written a more detailed update on this section, which can be found here. 

Each Git repo needs to authenticate with Azure to deploy/modify resources. Each repo should have a service principal in Azure AD. That service principal will be used to authenticate the deployment, executed by a GitHub action or a DevOps pipeline. You should restrict what rights the service principal will require. I haven’t worked out the exact minimum permissions, but the high-level requirements are documented below:

 

Trunk Branch Protection &  Pull Request

Some of you might be worried now – what’s to stop a developer/operator working on Workload A from accidentally creating rules that affect Workload X?

This is exactly why you implement standard practices on the Git repos:

  • Protect the Trunk branch: This means that no one can just update the version of the code that is deployed to your firewall or hub. If you want to create an updated, you have to create a branch of the trunk, make your edits in that trunk, and submit the changes to be merged into trunk as a pull request.
  • Enable pull request reviews: Select a panel of people that will review changes that are submitted as pull requests to the trunk. In our scenario, this should include the firewall admin(s), security admin(s), network admin(s), and maybe the platform & workload architects.

Now, I can only submit a suggested set of rules (and route/peering) changes that must be approved by the necessary people. I can still create my code without delay, but a change control and rollback process has taken control. Obviously, this means that there should be SLAs on the review/approval process and guidance on pull request, approval, and rejection actions.

And There You Have It

Now you have the design and the Bicep code to enable DevSecOps with Azure Firewall.

Azure Virtual WAN ARM – The Resources

In this post, I will explain the types of resources used in Azure Virtual WAN and the nature of their relationships.

Note, I have not included any content on the recently announced preview of third-party NVAs. I have not seen any materials on this yet to base such a post on and, being honest, I don’t have any use-cases for third-party NVAs.

As you can see – there are quite a few resources involved … and some that you won’t see listed at all because of the “appliance-like” nature of the deployment. I have not included any detail on spokes or “branch offices”, which would require further resources. The below diagram is enough to get a hub operational and connected to on-premises locations and spoke virtual networks.

The Virtual WAN – Microsoft.Network/virtualWans

You need at least one Virtual WAN to be deployed. This is what the hub will connect to, and you can connect many hubs to a common Virtual WAN to get automated any-to-any connectivity across the Microsoft physical WAN.

Surprisingly, the resource is deployed to an Azure region and not as a global resource, such as other global resources such as Traffic Manager or Azure DNS.

The Virtual Hub – Microsoft.Network/virtualHubs

Also known as the hub, the Virtual Hub is deployed once, and once only, per Azure region where you need a hub. This hub replaces the old hub virtual network (plus gateway(s), plus firewall, plus route tables) deployment you might be used to. The hub is deployed as a hidden resource, managed through the Virtual WAN in the Azure Portal or via scripting/ARM.

The hub is associated with the Virtual WAN through a virtualWAN property that references the resource ID of the virtualWans resource.

In a previous post, I referred to a chicken & egg scenario with the virtualHubs resource. The hub has properties that point to the resource IDs of each deployed gateway:

  • vpnGateway: For site-to-site VPN.
  • expressRouteGateway: For ExpressRoute circuit connectivity.
  • p2sVpnGateway: For end-user/device tunnels.

If you choose to deploy a “Secured Virtual Hub” there will also be a property called azureFirewall that will point to the resource ID of an Azure Firewall with the AZFW_Hub SKU.

Note, the restriction of 1 hub per Azure region does introduce a bottleneck. Under the covers of the platform, there is actually a virtual network. The only clue to this network will be in the peering properties of your spoke virtual networks. A single virtual network can have, today, a maximum of 500 spokes. So that means you will have a maximum of 500 spokes per Azure region.

Routing Tables – Microsoft.Network/virtualHubs/hubRouteTables & Microsoft.Network/virtualHubs/routeTables

These are resources that are used in custom routing, a recently announced as GA feature that won’t be live until August 3rd, according to the Azure Portal. The resource control the flows of traffic in your hub and spoke architecture. They are child-resources of the virtualHubs resource so no references of hub resource IDs are required.

Azure Firewall – Microsoft.Network/azureFirewalls

This is an optional resource that is deployed when you want a “Secured Virtual Hub”. Today, this is the only way to put a firewall into the hub, although a new preview program should make it possible for third-parties to join the hub. Alternatively, you can use custom routing to force north-south and east-west traffic through an NVA that is running in a spoke, although that will double peering costs.

The Azure Firewall is deployed with the AZFW_Hub SKU. The firewall is not a hidden resource. To manage the firewall, you must use an Azure Firewall Policy (aka Azure Firewall Manager). The firewall has a property called firewallPolicy that points to the resource ID of a firewallPolicies resource.

Azure Firewall Policy – Microsoft.Network/firewallPolicies

This is a resource that allows you to manage an Azure Firewall, in this case, an AZFW_Hub SKU of Azure Firewall. Although not shown here, you can deploy a parent/child configuration of policies to manage firewall configurations and rules in a global/local way.

VPN Gateway – Microsoft.Network/vpnGateways

This is one of 3 ways (one, two or all three at once) that you can connect on-premises (branch) sites to the hub and your Azure deployment(s). This gateway provides you with site-to-site connectivity using VPN. The VPN Gateway uses a property called virtualHub to point at the resource ID of the associated hub or virtualHubs resource. This is a hidden resource.

Note that the virtualHubs resource must also point at the resource ID of the VPN gateway resource ID using a property called vpnGateway.

ExpressRoute Gateway – Microsoft.Network/expressRouteGateways

This is one of 3 ways (one, two or all three at once) that you can connect on-premises (branch) sites to the hub and your Azure deployment(s). This gateway provides you with site-to-site connectivity using ExpressRoute. The ExpressRoute Gateway uses a property called virtualHub to point at the resource ID of the associated hub or virtualHubs resource. This is a hidden resource.

Note that the virtualHubs resource must also point at the resource ID of the ExpressRoute gateway resource ID using a property called p2sGateway.

Point-to-Site Gateway – Microsoft.Network/p2sVpnGateways

This is one of 3 ways (one, two or all three at once) that you can connect on-premises (branch) sites to the hub and your Azure deployment(s). This gateway provides users/devices with connectivity using VPN tunnels. The Point-to-Site Gateway uses a property called virtualHub to point at the resource ID of the associated hub or virtualHubs resource. This is a hidden resource.

The Point-to-Site Gateway inherits a VPN configuration from a VPN configuration resource based on Microsoft.Network/vpnServerConfigurations, referring to the configuration resource by its resource ID using a property called vpnServerConfiguration.

Note that the virtualHubs resource must also point at the resource ID of the Point-to-Site gateway resource ID using a property called p2sVpnGateway.

VPN Server Configuration – Microsoft.Network/vpnServerConfigurations

This configuration for Point-to-Site VPN gateways can be seen in the Azure WAN and is intended as a shared configuration that is reusable with more than one Point-to-Site VPN Gateway. To be honest, I can see myself using it as a per-region configuration because of some values like DNS servers and RADIUS servers that will probably be placed per-region for performance and resilience reasons. This is a hidden resource.

The following resources were added on 22nd July 2020:

VPN Sites – Microsoft.Network/vpnSites

This resource has a similar purpose to a Local Network Gateway for site-to-site VPN connections; it describes the on-premises location, AKA “branch office”.  A VPN site can be associated with one or many hubs, so it is actually connected to the Virtual WAN resource ID using a property called virtualWan. This is a hidden resource.

An array property called vpnSiteLinks describes possible connections to on-premises firewall devices.

VPN Connections – Microsoft.Network/vpnGateways/vpnConnections

A VPN Connections resource associates a VPN Gateway with the on-premises location that is described by an associated VPN Site. The vpnConnections resource is a child resource of vpnGateways, so there is no actual resource; the vpnConnections resource takes its name from the parent VPN Gateway, and the resource ID is an extension of the parent VPN Gateway resource ID.

By necessity, there is some complexity with this resource type. The remoteVpnSite property links the vpnConnections resource with the resource ID of a VPN Site resource. An array property, called vpnSiteLinkConnections, is used to connect the gateway to the on-premises location using 1 or 2 connections, each linking from vpnSiteLinkConnections to the resource/property ID of 1 or 2 vpnSiteLinks properties in the VPN Site. With one site link connection, you have a single VPN tunnel to the on-premises location. With 2 link connections, the VPN Gateway will take advantage of its active/active configuration to set up resilient tunnels to the on-premises location.

Virtual Network Connections – Microsoft.Network/virtualHubs/hubVirtualNetworkConnections

The purpose of a hub is to share resources with spoke virtual networks. In the case of the Virtual Hub, those resources are gateways, and maybe a firewall in the case of Secured Virtual Hub. As with a normal VNet-based hub & spoke, VNet peering is used. However, the way that VNet peering is used changes with the Virtual Hub; the deployment is done using the hub/VirtualNetworkConnections child resource, whose parent is the Virtual Hub. Therefore, the name and resource ID are based on the name and resource ID of the Virtual Hub resource.

The deployment is rather simple; you create a Virtual Network Connection in the hub specifying the resource ID of the spoke virtual network, using a property called remoteVirtualNetwork. The underlying resource provider will initiate both sides of the peering connection on your behalf – there is no deployment required in the spoke virtual network resource. The Virtual Network Connection will reference the Hub Route Tables in the hub to configure route association and propagation.

More Resources

There are more resources that I’ve yet to document, including:

Rethinking Firewall Management With Azure Firewall Manager

Microsoft has just announced the general availability a feature that I’ve been waiting for since I first learned about it last Autumn, called Azure Firewall Manager. Azure Firewall Manager allows you to centrally manage one or more Azure Firewall instances through a central, policy-driven, user interface. And it’s those policies, Azure Firewall Policies, that made me re-think Azure Firewall management a few months ago when I was writing my Cloud Mechanix course (running next ONLINE on July 30th) “Securing Azure Services & Data Through Azure Networking”.

Azure Firewall Policy

This is a new resource type that is generally available today. Azure Firewall Policy outsources the configuration and management of the firewall to a policy resource; that means that the usual settings in the Azure Firewall for things like rules and Threat Intelligence move from the firewall resource to a policy when a policy is associated with the firewall.

Policies can be created in a hierarchy. You can create a parent/global policy that will contain configurations and rules that will apply to all/a number of firewall instances. Then you create a child policy that inherits from the parent; note that rules changes in the parent instantly appear in the child. The child is associated with a firewall and applies configurations/rules from the parent policy and the child policy instantly to the firewall.

Problem

I’ve deployed and configured multiple customers where we have virtual data centers (VDCs, which are governed & secured hub and spoke architectures) across multiple regions. Creating rules configurations to allow flows from a spoke/service in one region to another spoke/service in another region is a royal pain in the tushie. Here’s the network flow (as I documented with routing here):

  1. Source device
  2. Outbound NSG rules in source spoke
  3. Firewall in source hub
  4. Firewall in destination hub
  5. Inbound NSG rules at destination spoke
  6. Destination device

There are potentially 4 sets of rules to configure for a simple service running on a single protocol/port. Today I configured Microsoft Identity Management for this scenario and there were dozens of protocol/port combinations across three spokes. The work took hours to complete – which I did in code and it provided a working result for the identity consulting team.

I minimise the work by controlling outbound flows in the local hub firewall, not in the NSG. So the NSGs do not control outbound flows at all. I could allow all via the firewall, even to other private networks, but that goes against the idea of compartmentalisation or micro-segmentation to combat modern network threats – so I need to configure both firewalls for a flow.

Solution

Re-think the firewall for a moment. Imagine you had one virtual firewall that spanned all of your Azure regional deployments. You can control all global flows with one configuration in that global virtual firewall. The global virtual firewall has instances in each Azure region. Any local flows can be configured just in that instance. That’s what Firewall Policy allows.

  • Parent Policy: Place all your global configurations in here. Some configurations will be company-wide, such as Threat Intelligence. Some rules, like allowing access to Microsoft URIs or Azure services (service tags) will be global too. And this is where you put the rules to allow flows between one regional deployment and another. This global management takes all your local Azure Firewall resources and treats them as a single security service.
  • Child Policies: A child policy will be created for each Azure Firewall instance. This policy will inherit the above from the parent applying the global configuration. Local rules, to allow north-south access to/from local services (Internet or on-prem) or east-west (spoke-to-spoke in the same regional deployment) will be configured here. RBAC can be enabled to allow local network admins to do their own thing, but unable to undo what the parent has done.

I haven’t had a chance to test Azure Firewall Policy out yet since the GA announcement, but I’m hoping that the third tier in rules (Rules Groups) made it from preview to GA. I do have groupings of rules collections based on buckets of priorities. This organisation would be awesome in my vision of Azure Firewall management.

Connecting Azure Hub-And-Spoke Architectures Together

In this post, I will explain how you can connect multiple Azure hub-and-spoke (virtual data centre) deployments together using Azure networking, even across different Azure regions.

There is a lot to know here so here is some recommended reading that I previously published:

If you are using Azure Virtual WAN Hub then some stuff will be different and that scenario is not covered fully here – Azure Virtual WAN Hub has a preview (today) feature for Any-to-Any routing.

The Scenario

In this case, there are two hub-and-spoke deployments:

  • Blue: Multiple virtual networks covered by the CIDR of 10.1.0.0/16
  • Green: Another set of multiple virtual networks covered by the CIDR of 10.2.0.0/16

I’m being strategic with the addressing of each hub-and-spoke deployment, ensuring that a single CIDR will include the hub and all spokes of a single deployment – this will come in handy when we look at User-Defined Routes.

Either of these hub-and-spoke deployments could be in the same region or even in different Azure regions. It is desired that if:

  • Any spoke wishes to talk to another spoke it will route through the local firewall in the local hub.
  • All traffic coming into a spoke from an outside source, such as the other hub-and-spoke, must route through the local firewall in the local hub.

That would mean that Spoke 1 must route through Hub 1 and then Hub 2 to talk to Spoke 4. The firewall can be a third-party appliance or the Azure Firewall.

Core Routing

Each subnet in each spoke needs a route to the outside world (0.0.0.0/0) via the local firewall. For example:

  • The Blue firewall backend/private IP address is 10.1.0.132
  • A Route Table for each subnet is created in the Blue deployment and has a route to 0.0.0.0/0 via a virtual appliance with an IP address of 10.1.0.132
  • The Greenfirewall backend/private IP address is 10.2.0.132
  • A Route Table for each subnet is created in the Green deployment and has a route to 0.0.0.0/0 via a virtual appliance with an IP address of 10.2.0.132

Note: Some network-connected PaaS services, e.g. API Management or SQL Managed Instance, require additional routes to the “control plane” that will bypass the local firewall.

Site-to-Site VPN

In this scenario, the organisation is connecting on-premises networks to 1 or more of the hub-and-spoke deployments with a site-to-site VPN connection. That connection goes to the hub of Blue and to Green hubs.

To connect Blue and Green you will need to configure VNet Peering, which can work inside a region or across regions (using Microsoft’s low latency WAN, the second-largest private WAN on the planet). Each end of peering needs the following settings (the names of the settings change so I’m not checking their exact naming):

  • Enabled: Yes
  • Allow Transit: Yes
  • Use Remote Gateway: No
  • Allow Gateway Sharing: No

Let’s go back and do some routing theory!

That peering connection will add a hidden Default (“system”) route to each subnet in the hub subnets:

  • Blue hub subnets: A route to 10.2.0.0/24
  • Green hub subnets: A route to 10.1.0.0/24

Now imagine you are a packet in Spoke 1 trying to get to Spoke 4. You’re sent to the firewall in Blue Hub 1. The firewall lets the traffic out (if a rule allows it) and now the packet sits in the egress/frontend/firewall subnet and is trying to find a route to 10.2.2.0/24. The peering-created Default route covers 10.2.0.0/24 but not the subnet for Spoke 4. So that means the default route to 0.0.0.0/0 (Internet) will be used and the packet is lost.

To fix this you will need to add a Route Table to the egress/frontend/firewall subnet in each hub:

  • Blue firewall subnet Route Table: 10.2.0.0/16 via virtual appliance 10.2.0.132
  • Red firewall subnet Route Table: 10.1.0.0/16 via virtual appliance 10.1.0.132

Thanks to my clever addressing of each hub-and-spoke, a single route will cover all packets leaving Blue and trying to get to any spoke in Red and vice-versa.

ExpressRoute

Now the customer has decided to use ExpressRoute to connect to Azure – Sweet! But guess what – you don’t need 1 expensive circuit to each hub-and-spoke.

You can share a single circuit across multiple ExpressRoute gateways:

  • ExpressRoute Standard: Up to 10 simultaneous connections to Virtual Network Gateways in 1+ regions in the same geopolitical region.
  • ExpressRoute Premium: Up to 100 simultaneous connections to Virtual Network Gateways in 1+ regions in any geopolitical region.

FYI, ExpressRoute connections to the Azure Virtual WAN Hub must be of the Premium SKU.

ExpressRoute is powered by BGP. All the on-premises routes that are advertised propagate through the ISP to the Microsoft edge router (“meet-me”) in the edge data centre. For example, if I want an ExpressRoute circuit to Azure West Europe (Middenmeer, Netherlands – not Amsterdam) I will probably (not always) get a circuit to the POP or edge data centre in Amsterdam. That gets me a physical low-latency connection onto the Microsoft WAN – and my BGP routes get to the meet-me router in Amsterdam. Now I can route to locations on that WAN. If I connect a VNet Gateway to that circuit to Blue in Azure West Europe, then my BGP routes will propagate from the meet-me router to the GatewaySubnet in the Blue hub, and then on to my firewall subnet.

BGP propagation is disabled in the spoke Route Tables to ensure all outbound flows go through the local firewall.

But that is not the extent of things! The hub-and-spoke peering connections allow Gateway Sharing from the hub and Use Remote Gateway from the spoke. With that configuration, BGP routes to the spoke get propagated to the GatewaySubnet in the hub, then to the meet-me router, through the ISP and then to the on-premises network. This is what our solution is based on.

Let’s imagine that the Green deployment is in North Europe (Dublin, Ireland). I could get a second ExpressRoute connection but:

  • That will add cost
  • Not give me the clever solution that I want – but I could work around that with ExpressRoute Global Reach

I’m going to keep this simple – by the way, if I wanted Green to be in a different geopolitical region such as East US 2 then I could use ExpressRoute Premium to make this work.

In the Green hub, the Virtual Network Gateway will connect to the existing ExpressRoute circuit – no more money to the ISP! That means Green will connect to the same meet-me router as Blue. The on-premises routes will get into Green the exact same way as with Blue. And the routes to the Green spokes will also propagate down to on-premises via the meet-me router. That meet-me router knows all about the subnets in Blue and Green. And guess what BGP routers do? They propagate – so, the routes to all of the Blue subnets propagate to Green and vice-versa with the next hop (after the Virtual Network Gateway) being the meet-me router. There are no Route Tables or peering required in the hubs – it just works!

Now the path from Blue Spoke 1 to Green Spoke 4 is Blue Hub Firewall, Blue Virtual Network Gateway, <the Microsoft WAN>, Microsoft (meet-me) Router, <the Microsoft WAN>, Green Virtual Network Gateway, Green Hub Firewall, Green Spoke 4.

There are ways to make this scenario more interesting. Let’s say I have an office in London and I want to use Microsoft Azure. Some stuff will reside in UK South for compliance or performance reasons. But UK South is not a “hero region” as Microsoft calls them. There might be more advanced features that I want to use that are only in West Europe. I could use two ExpressRoute circuits, one to UK South and one to West Europe. Or I could set up a single circuit to London to get me onto the Microsoft WAN and connected this circuit to both of my deployments in UK South and West Europe. I have a quicker route going Office > ISP > London edge data center > Azure West Europe than from Office > ISP > Amsterdam edge data center > Azure West Europe because I have reduced the latency between me and West Europe by reducing the length of the ISP circuit and using the more-direct Microsoft WAN. Just like with Azure Front Door, you want to get onto the Microsoft WAN as quickly as possible and let it get you to your destination as quickly as possible.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 – Building and Managing Distributed Micro-Perimeters With Azure Firewall

Speaker: Yair Tor, Principal Program Manager

Azure Firewall

Cloud native stateful firewall as a service. A first among public cloud providers.

  • Central governance of all traffic flows
    • Built in high availability and auto scale
    • Network and application traffic filtering
    • Centralized policy across VNets and subscriptions
  • Complete VNet protection
    • Filter outbound, inbound, spoke-spoke
  • Centralized logging
  • Best for Azure

Key Features

  • Application Rules
  • Fully stateful network rules
  • NAT support
  • Threat Intelligence (GA this week)
  • Monitoring
  • Support for inbound and hybrid connections
  • Network Watcher integration

Azure Firewall Updates

  • Recently released
    • Multiple public IPs GA – up ot 100
    • Availability zones now GA (99.99% SLA)
    • Threat Intelligence based filtering now GA
    • Azure HDInsight (HDI) FQDN tag GA
    • TDS (SQL) FQDN filtering in Preview
  • Sovereign Clouds
    • US Gov
    • China
  • Coming soon: tentative ETA H2 CY 2019
    • FQDN filtering for all ports and protocols
    • Native forced tunnelling support
    • IP groups in Azure Firewall rules – coming to NSG and UDR too.

Azure Firewall Manager – See Previous Post

Preview

  • Central deployment and configuration
  • Automated routing
  • Advanced security with 3rd party SECaaS

Roadmap:

  • Virtual network support – this is the legacy form of Azure Firewall that is not the new Azure vWAN Hub Azure Firewall.
  • Split routing

Public Preview

  • Extend your security edge to Azure with Secured Virtual Hubs.
  • A secured virtual hub is an azure Virtual WAN Hub with associated security and routing policies configured by Azure Firewall Manager.
  • Easily create hub-and-spoke architectures with cloud native security services for traffic governance and protection.
  • Azure Firewall now integrated with Virtual WAN Hubs.
  • Secured virtual hub can be used as a managed central network with no on-prem connectivity.
  • There is no resource called Security Virtual Hub – it’s more of a deployment/concept. If you did a JSON deployment, it would use legacy resources.

Getting Started with Secured Virtual Hubs

One method:

  1. Create your hub and spoke architecture
  2. Select security providers: Done by secured virtual hub creation or by converting a Virtual WaN hub to secure virtual hub.
  3. Create a firewall policy and associate it with your hub: applicable only if using Azure Firewall
  4. Configure route settings on your secured hub to attract traffic: Easily attract traffic to the firewall from the spoke VNets – BGP!

Demo

Network rules are always processed before application rules in Azure Firewall. Inherited policy cannot allow stuff that parent policy denies.

Central Security and Route Policy Management

  • Deploy and configure multiple Azure Firewall instances
  • DevOps optimized hierarchical Azure Firewall Policies
  • Centralized routing configuration

GA Pricing

  • Preview has 50% discount
  • Azure Firewall in secure virtual hubs will be the same price as normal Azure Firewall
  • $100 per policy for policies that are associated with multiple hubs. No cost with policies associated with single hubs.
  • Fixed fee for outbound VPN to SECaaS partners in addition to a VPN scale unit charge.

BGP with Microsoft Azure Virtual Networks & Firewalls

In this article, I want to explain how important BGP is in Azure networking, even if you do not actually use BGP for routing, and the major role it plays in hub-and-spoke architectures and deployments with a firewall.

What is BGP?

I was never the network guy in an on-premises deployment. Those 3 letters, BGP, were something someone else worried about. But in Azure, the server admin becomes a network admin. Most of my work in Azure is networking now. And that means that the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is important to me now.

BGP is a means of propagating routes around a network. It’s a form of advertising or propagation that spreads routes to one or more destinations one hop at a time. If you think about it, BGP is like word-of-mouth.

A network, Subnet A, is a destination. Subnet A advertises a route to itself to a neighbour network, Subnet B. Subnet B advertises to its neighbours, including Subnet C, that it knows how to get to the original subnet, Subnet A. And the propagation continues. A subnet at the far end of the LAN/WAN, Subnet D, knows that there is another subnet far away called Subnet A and that the path to Subnet A is back via the propagating neighbour, Subnet C. Subnet C will then forward the traffic to Subnet B, which in turn sends the traffic to the destination subnet, Subnet A.

Azure and BGP

Whether you use BGP in your on-premises network or not, there will be a pretty high percentage chance that you will use BGP in Azure virtual networking – we’ll get to that in a few moments.

If you create a site-to-site VPN connection, you have the option to integrate your on-premises BGP routing with your Azure virtual network(s). If you use ExpressRoute, you must use BGP. In both cases, BGP routes are propagated from on-premises, informing your Azure virtual network gateway of all the on-premises networks that it can route to over that connection.

But BGP Is Used Without BGP

Let’s say that you are deploying a site-to-site VPN connection to Azure and that you do not use BGP in your configuration. Instead, you create a Local Network Gateway in Azure to define your on-premises networks. The virtual network gateway will load those networks from the Local Network Gateway and know to route across the associated VPN tunnel to get to those destinations.

And here’s where things get interesting. Those routes must get advertised around the virtual network.

If a virtual machine in the virtual network needs to talk to on-premises, it needs to know that the route to that on-premises subnet is via the VNet Gateway in the gateway subnet. So, the route gets propagated out from the gateway subnet.

Let’s scale that situation out a bit to a hub & spoke architecture. We have a site-to-site connection with or without BGP being used. The routes to on-premises are in the VNet Gateway and are propagated out to the subnets in the hub VNet that contains the VNet Gateway. And in turn, the routes are advertised to peered virtual networks (spokes) and their subnets. Now a resource on a subnet in a spoke virtual network has a route to an on-premises virtual network – across the peering connection and to the virtual network gateway.

Note: in this scenario, the hub is sharing the VNet gateway via peering, and the spoke is configured in peering to use the remote VNet gateway.

Bi-Directional

Routing is always a 2-way street. If routes only went one way, then a client could talk to a server, but the server would not be able to talk to the client.

If we have BGP enabled VPN or ExpressRoute, then Azure will propagate routes for the spoke subnets back down through peering and to the VNet Gateway. The VNet Gateway will then propagate those routes back to on-premises.

If you do not have BGP VPN (you are statically setting up on-premises routes in the Local Network Gateway) then you will have to add the address space of each spoke subnet to the on-premises VPN appliance(s) so that they know to route via the tunnel to get to the spokes. The simple way to do that is to plan your Azure networking in advance and have a single supernet (a /16, for example) instead of a long list of smaller subnets (/24s, for example) to configure.

Control & Security

Let’s say that you want to add a firewall to your hub. You want to use this firewall to isolate everything outside of Azure from your hub and spoke architecture, including the on-premises networks. You’ve done some research and found that you need to add a route table and a user-defined route to your hub and spoke subnets, instructing them that the route to on-premises is through the VNet Gateway.

Now you need to do some reading – you need to learn (1) how Azure routing really works (not how you think it works) and (2) how to troubleshoot Azure routing. FYI, I’ve been living in this world non-stop for the last 10 months.

What you will probably have done is configured your spokes with a route to 0.0.0.0/0 via the internal/backend IP address of the firewall. You are assuming that will send all traffic to anywhere via the Firewall. Under the covers, though, routes to on-premises are still propagating from the VNet Gateway to all the subnets in your hub and spoke architecture. If on-premises was 192.168.1.0/24 and your spoke machine wanted to route to on-premises, then the Azure network fabric will compare the destination with the routes that it has in a hidden route table – the only place you can see this is in Effective Routes in a VM NIC Azure resource. You have a UDR for 0.0.0.0/0 via the firewall. That’s a 0-bit match for any destinations in 192.168.1.0/24. If that was the only route in the subnet, then that route would be taken. But we are sending a packet to 192.168.1.x and that is a 24-bit match with the propagated route to 192.1681.0/24. And that’s why the response from the spoke resource will bypass the firewall and go straight to the VNet Gateway (via peering) to get to on-premises. That is not what you expected or wanted!

Note: the eagle-eyed person that understands routing will know that there will be other routes in the subnet, but they are irrelevant in this case and will confuse the explanation.

The following works even if you do not use BGP with a site-to-site VPN!

To solve this problem, we can stop propagation – we can edit the route table resources in the internal Azure subnets (or pre-do this in JSON) and disable BGP route propagation. The result of this is that the routes that the VNet Gateway were pushing out to other subnets will stop being propagated. Now if we viewed the effective routes for a spoke subnet, we’d only see a route to the firewall and the firewall is now responsible for forwarding traffic to on-premises networks to the VNet Gateway.

It is important to understand that this disabling of propagation affects the propagation only in 1 direction. Routes from the VNet Gateway will not be propagated to subnets with propagation disabled. However, ALL subnets will still propagate routes to themselves back to the VNet Gateway – we need on-premises to know that the route to these Azure subnets is still via the Gateway.

More work will be required to get the Gateway Subnet to route via the firewall, but that’s a whole other topic! We’re sticking to BGP and propagation here.

The Firewall and BGP Propagation

Let’s make a mistake, shall we? It will be useful to get a better understanding of the features. We shall add a route table to the firewall subnet and disable BGP route propagation. Now the resource in the spoke subnet wants to send something to an on-premises network. The local subnet route table instructs it to send all traffic to external destinations (0.0.0.0/0) via the firewall. The packets hit the firewall. The firewall tries to send that traffic out and … it has only one route (a simplification) which is to send 0.0.0.0/0 to Internet.

By disabling BGP propagation on the firewall subnet, the firewall no longer knows that the route to on-premises networks is via the virtual network gateway. This is one of those scenarios where people claim that their firewall isn’t logging traffic or flows – in reality, the traffic is bypassing the firewall because they haven’t managed their routing.

The firewall must know that the on-premises networks (a) exist and (b) are routes to via the VNet Gateway. Therefore, BGP propagation must be left enabled on the firewall subnet (the frontend one, if you have a split frontend/backend firewall subnet design).

Not Just Firewalls!

I’m not covering it here, but there are architectures where there might be other subnets that must bypass the firewall to get back to on-premises. In those cases, those subnets must also have BGP propagation left enabled – they must know that the on-premises networks exist and that they should route via the VNet Gateway.

Creating an Azure Service for Slow Moving Organisations

In this post, I will explain how you can use Azure’s Public IP Prefix feature to pre-create public IP addresses to access Azure services when you are working big/government organisations that can take weeks to configure a VPN tunnel, outbound firewall rule, and so on.

In this scenario, I need a predictable IP address so that means I must use the Standard SKU address tier.

The Problem

It normally only takes a few minutes to create a firewall rule, a VPN tunnel, etc in an on-premises network. But sometimes it seems to take forever! I’ve been in that situation – you’ve set up an environment for the customer to work with, but their on-premises networking team(s) are slow to do anything. And you only wish that you had given them all the details that they needed earlier in the project so their configuration work would end when your weeks of engineering was wrapping up.

But you won’t know the public IP address until you create it. And that is normally only created when you create the virtual network gateway, Azure Firewall, Application Firewall, etc. But what if you had a pool of Azure public IP addresses that were pre-reserved and ready to share with the network team. Maybe they could be used to make early requests for VPN tunnels, firewall rules, and so on? Luckily, we can do that!

Public IP Prefix

An Azure Public IP Prefix is a set of reserved public IP addresses (PIPs). You can create an IP Prefix of a certain size, from /31 (2 addresses) to /24 (256 addresses), in a certain region. The pool of addresses is a contiguous block of predictable addresses. And from that pool, you can create public IP addresses for your Azure resources.

In my example, I want a Standard tier IP address and this requires a Standard tier Public IP Prefix. Unfortunately, the Azure Portal doesn’t allow for this with Public IP Prefix, so we need some PowerShell. First, we’ll define some reused variables:

$rgName = "test"
$region = "westeurope"
$ipPrefixName = "test-ipfx"

Now we will create the Publix IP Prefix. Note that the length refers to the subnet mask length. In my example that’s a /30 resulting in a prefix with 4 reserved public IP addresses:

$ipPrefix = New-AzPublicIpPrefix -Name $ipPrefixName -ResourceGroupName $rgName -PrefixLength 30 -Sku Standard -Location $region

You’ll note above that I used Standard in the command. This creates a pool of static Standard tier public IP addresses. I could have dropped the Standard, and that would have created a pool of static Basic tier IP addresses – you can use the Azure Portal to deploy Basic tier Public IP Prefix and public IP addresses from that prefix. The decision to use Standard tier or Basic tier affects what resources I can deploy with the addresses:

  • Standard: Azure Firewall, zone-redundant virtual network gateways, v2 application gateways/firewalls, standard tier load balancers, etc.
  • Basic static: Basic tier load balancers, v1 application gateways/firewalls, etc.

Note that the non-zone redundant virtual network gateways cannot use static public IP addresses and therefore cannot use Public IP Prefix.

Creating a Public IP Address

Let’s say that I have a project coming up where I need to deploy an Application Firewall and I know the on-premises network team will take weeks to allow outbound access to my new web service. Instead of waiting until I build the application, I can reserve the IP address now, tell the on-premises firewall team to allow it, and then work on my project. Hopefully, by the time I have the site up and running and presented to the Internet by my Application Firewall, they will have created the outbound firewall rule from the company network.

Browse to the Public IP Prefix and make sure that it is in the same region as the new virtual network and virtual network gateway. Open the prefix and check Allocated IP Addresses in the Overview. Make sure that there is free capacity in the reserved block.

Now I can continue to use my variables from above and create a new public IP address from one of the reserved addresses in the Public IP Prefix:

New-AzPublicIpAddress -Name "test-vpn-pip" -ResourceGroupName $rgName -AllocationMethod Static -DomainNameLabel "test-vpn" -Location $region -PublicIpPrefix $ipPrefix -Sku Standard

Use the Public IP Address

I now have everything I need to pass onto the on-premises network team in my request. In my example, I am going to create a v2 Application Firewall.

Once I configure the WAF, the on-premises firewall will (hopefully) already have the rule to allow outbound connections to my pre-reserved IP address and, therefore, my new web service.

Migrating Azure Firewall To Availability Zones

Microsoft recently added support for availability zones to Azure firewall in regions that offer this higher level of SLA. In this post, I will explain how you can convert an existing Azure Firewall to availability zones.

Before We Proceed

There are two things you need to understand:

  1. If you have already deployed and configured Azure Firewall then there is no easy switch to turn on availability zones. What I will be showing is actually a re-creation.
  2. You should do a “dress rehearsal” – test this process and validate the results before you do the actual migration.

The Process

The process you will do will go as follows:

  1. Plan a maintenance window when the Azure Firewall (and dependent communications) will be unavailable for 1 or 2 hours. Really, this should be very quick but, as Scotty told Geordi La Forge, a good engineer overestimates the effort, leaves room for the unexpected, and hopefully looks like a hero if all goes to the unspoken plan.
  2. Freeze configuration changes to the Azure Firewall.
  3. Perform a backup of the Azure Firewall.
  4. Create a test environment in Azure – ideally a dedicated subscription/virtual network(s) minus the Azure Firewall (see the next step).
  5. Modify the JSON file to include support for availability zones.
  6. Restore the Azure Firewall backup as a new firewall in the test environment.
  7. Validate that that new firewall has availability zones and that the rules configuration matches that of the original.
  8. Confirm & wait for the maintenance window.
  9. Delete the Azure Firewall – yes, delete it.
  10. Restore the Azure Firewall from your modified JSON file.
  11. Validate the restore
  12. Celebrate – you have an Azure Firewall that supports multiple zones in the region.

Some of the Technical Bits

The processes of backing up and restoring the Azure Firewall are covered in my post here.

The backup is a JSON export of the original Azure Firewall, describing how to rebuild and re-configure it exactly as is – without support for availability zones. Open that JSON and make 2 changes.

The first change is to make sure that the API for deploying the Azure Firewall is up to date:

        {
            "apiVersion": "2019-04-01",
            "type": "Microsoft.Network/azureFirewalls",

The next change is to instruct Azure which availability zones (numbered 1, 2, and 3) that you want to use for availability zones in the region:

        {
            "apiVersion": "2019-04-01",
            "type": "Microsoft.Network/azureFirewalls",
            "name": "[variables('FirewallName')]",
            "location": "[variables('RegionName')]",
            "zones": [
                "1",
                "2",
                "3"
            ],
            "properties": {
                "ipConfigurations": [
                    {

And that’s that. When you deploy the modified JSON the new Azure Firewall will exist in all three zones.

Note that you can use this method to place an Azure Firewall into a single specific zone.

Costs Versus SLAs

A single zone Azure Firewall has a 99.95% SLA. Using 2 or 3 zones will increase the SLA to 99.99%. You might argue “what’s the point?”. I’ve witnessed a data center (actually, it was a single storage cluster) in an Azure region go down. That can have catastrophic results on a service. It’s rare but it’s bad. If you’re building a network where the Azure Firewall is the centre of secure, then it becomes mission critical and should, in my opinion, span availability zones, not for the contractual financial protections in an SLA but for protecting mission critical services.  That protection comes at a cost – you’ll now incur the micro-costs of data flows between zones in a region. From what I’ve seen so far, that’s a tiny number and a company that can afford a firewall will easily absorb that extra relatively low cost.