
Generally, bastion hosts will have some degree of extra attention paid to their security, may undergo regular audits, and may have modified software.īastion hosts look to limit potential threats of intrusion to your VMs by placing the host at the perimeter of your VNET.

A bastion host is a system identified by the firewall administrator as a critical strong point in the network's security. Marcus stated a Bastion host was:īastion host - Bastions are the highly fortified parts of a medieval castle points that overlook critical areas of defense, usually having stronger walls, room for extra troops, and the occasional useful tub of boiling hot oil for discouraging attackers. Ranum of Trusted Information Systems that discusses why firewalls are important.
#Bastion host manual
Once I had authenticated into this "jump box" I could now use an internal network to access my servers and start looking to troubleshoot whatever issue that required manual intervention.īastion as a term for this "jump box" has been used dating back to a 1993 article by Marcus J. The concept of a Bastion server isn't new, some may know it as a "jump box." Many times in my past I'd need to SSH into a company-managed server that spanned multiple networks in order to access resources. We've come up with many solutions to automate deploys and have systems remain ephemeral, but there's still a need for someone to log in at times. You also may want to do some debugging via system logs to try to find an answer to common problems like, "why is this process failing" or the always fun "why is this server crashing" question. Some come from remaining IT systems you may have had to lift-and-shift from another provider or an on-prem solution. Not all applications are born int he cloud. Why do you need to administrative access into your Virtual Machines still?
#Bastion host how to
This blog post will look into what Bastion is and how to get started using it. In a world of distributed teams managing IT solutions, you may want to consider the Azure Bastion Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to manage how administrators can access your resources. Creating ways to avoid modifications to your Azure Network Security Group (NSG) or running a dedicated VPN exist. Finding solutions to avoid making additional network firewall rules for server management can be clumsy. Sometimes when troubleshooting a problem, it helps to have administrative access directly to the server. Lately, I have been spending a lot of time working with Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) debugging some ways to deploy applications.
