Hi there folks!

I’ve been busy lately buried in learning and practicing Kubernetes in preparation for the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. Tonight I’m taking a break to bring you another entry into the “What If” series I started a few months back.

Let’s get right to it.

What if I need to access a Private Endpoint in a subscription associated with a different Azure AD tenant and I have an existing Azure Private DNS Zone already?

I’ve been helping a good friend who recently joined Microsoft to support his customer as he gets up to speed on the Azure platform. This customer consists of two very large organizations which have a high degree of independence. Each of these organizations have their own Azure AD tenant and their own Azure footprint. One organization is further along in their cloud journey than the other.

Organization A (new to Azure) needed to consume some data that existed in an Azure SQL database in an Azure subscription associated with Organization B’s tenant. Both organizations have strict security and compliance requirements so they are heavy users of Azure PrivateLink Endpoints. A site-to-site VPN (virtual private network) connection was established between the two organizations to facilitate network communication between the Azure environments.

The customer environment looked similar to the above where a machine on-premises in Organization A needed to access the Azure SQL database in Organization B. If you look closely, you probably see the problem already. From a DNS perspective, we have two Azure Private DNS Zones for privatelink.database.windows.net. This means we have two authorities for the same zone.

My peer and I went back on forth with a few different solutions. One solution seemed obvious in that organization A would manually create an A record in their Azure Private DNS zone pointing to IP of the PrivateLink Endpoint in Organization B. Since the organizations had connectivity between the two environments, this would technically work. The challenge with this pattern is it would introduce a potential bottleneck depending on the size of the VPN pipe. It could also lead to egress costs for Organization A depending on how the VPN connection was implemented.

The other option we came up with was to create a Private Endpoint in Organization A’s Azure subscription which would be associated with the Azure SQL instance running in Organization B’s Azure subscription. This would avoid any egress costs, we wouldn’t be introducing a potential bottleneck, and we’d avoid the additional operational head of having to manually manage the A record in Organization A’s Azure Private DNS Zone. Neither of us had done this before and while it seemed to be possible based on Microsoft’s documentation, the how was a bit lacking when talking PaaS services.

To test this I used two separate personal tenants I keep to test scenarios that aren’t feasible to test with internal resources. My goal was to build an architecture like the below.

So was it possible? Why yes it was, and an added bonus I’m going to tell you how to do it.

When you create a Private Endpoint through the Azure Portal, there is a Connection Method radio button seen below. If you’re creating the Private Endpoint for a resource within the existing tenant you can choose the Connect to an Azure resource in my directory option and you get a handy guided selection tool. If you want to connect to a resource outside your tenant, you instead have to select the Connect to an Azure resource by resource ID or alias. In this field you would end the full resource ID of the resource you’re creating the Private Endpoint for, which in this case is the Azure SQL server resource id. You’ll be prompted to enter the sub-resource which for Azure SQL is SqlServer. Proceed to create the Private Endpoint.

After the Private Endpoint has been created you’ll observe it has a Connection status of Pending. This is part of the approval workflow where someone with control over the resource in the destination tenant needs to approve of the connection to the Azure SQL server.

If you jump over to the other resource in the target tenant and select the Private endpoint connections menu option you’ll see there is a pending connection that needs approval along with a message from the requestor.

Select the endpoint to approve and click the approve button. At that point the Private Endpoint in the requestor tenant and you’ll see it has been approved and is ready for use.

This was a fun little problem to work through. I was always under the assumption this would work, the documentation said it would work, but I’m a trust but verify type of person so I wanted to see and experience it for myself.

I hope you enjoyed the post and learned something new. Now back to practicing Kubernetes labs!