All Things Cloud — why "Winticloud"

The name Winticloud is composed of Winti — the local abbreviation for Winterthur — and Cloud. I had reserved the domain for quite some time, just like that, without any concrete idea what to do with it. At that time I was still working as a team leader and network / network-security engineer, mainly in the physical and virtualised world, employed by a company close to the Swiss government — where the cloud was demonised.

At the beginning of 2019, after a somewhat longer process, it became clear to me that I wanted to move towards the cloud. And so, at the end of 2019, I joined my current employer Baggenstos & Co AG, who were looking for a network engineer for the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

LinkedIn · Patrick Sigrist Gute Aussichten! Seit nun zwei Wochen arbeite ich bei meinem neuen Arbeitgeber A. Baggenstos & Co. AG … Zum ersten Mal kann ich «Infrastructure as a Code» selber schreiben und mittels PowerShell-Scripts innert kürzester Zeit komplexe Netzwerke realisieren. View on LinkedIn →

I was thrown in at the deep end and got to set up a worldwide Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) network with 30 locations around the globe for a customer. But I’ll dedicate a separate article to those experiences — I’ve spent too many hours on the phone with Microsoft Support to mention it in a subordinate clause.

Besides the Virtual WAN there are a lot of new things in Azure for me, but I didn’t have to give up my network knowledge completely — there are simply a few things to understand if you want to build or operate a network in Azure.

All beginnings are hard…

LinkedIn · Patrick Sigrist MfG, mit freundlichen Grüßen … ARD, ZDF, C&A … wer kennt ihn nicht, den Songtext von «Die Fantastischen Vier». Mit IaaS, PaaS und SaaS geht es mir als ☁️-Newbie noch ziemlich ähnlich … ich gönne mir jetzt ein #CaaS (CoffeeAsAService). View on LinkedIn →

I used to have to drive to noisy data centres to install a VPN gateway. Today, thanks to the Azure Cloud, I do this as follows:

$VPNGwUS = New-AzVpnGateway -ResourceGroupName $ResGrObjVpnGwUS `
  -Name ($NamePrefix + "-vpngw-cus1") -VirtualHub $VHubUS `
  -VpnGatewayScaleUnit 1 -Tag $Tags

It’s pretty cool, huh? For the first time as a network engineer I can build a complete virtual datacentre from my desk. A dream becomes reality.