For a while now, I’ve been wanting to leverage a cloud service to host a scanning tool I’m working with. Given that the scan results are sensitive, I don’t really want to have the scanner publicly available. So it’s always struck me that a virtual private cloud with point-to-site VPN is the solution. Straightforward, right?
Well, no…
AWS doesn’t support it. I suppose I could configure something with an additional VPN server that straddles the Interwebz and the VPC but seriously? One more machine, more config, more support… blech.
Enter Azure – turns out, they support point-to-site VPN connections. It made my VPC hosting decision pretty easy.
Caveat: I didn’t look into Rackspace or the myriad of other “me-too’s!” out there. Just AWS and Azure.
You can read up on point-to-site VPNs here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windowsazure/dn133792.aspx Keep in mind, this feature is currently (as of 2/2014) in CTP mode so it’s not exactly production ready. But since my site is small and won’t have a ton of traffic, I’m OK taking some chances on availability.
So finally the project kicks off today – ironically, creating the Azure VPC is quick but creating just the simple gateway? Not so much… Azure’s been churning away for 20 minutes already and still the gateway hasn’t completed. I guess I’ll capture the next step in another post.
