A personal VPN is a nice way of securing traffic between your device and the Internet. Securing your traffic is good for several reasons including safe browsing when one is away from a trusted network like one’s home or office. Untrusted networks would be those at coffee shops, airports, hotels, public libraries, and other places where you do not know who or what is on the network or might be sniffing network traffic. Moreover, it establishes a point of presence on the internet at some place other than where you are physically located because the VPN server is where the traffic enters the public Internet.
OpenVPN is an open source VPN solution that provides both client and server components for creating a VPN. Because it is open source, it has been ported to virtually every platform so there are clients for iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows, and virtually every other operating system known to man. Using OpenVPN on Azure is a great solution for a low cost, private VPN. With Azure, you can use a small B-Series VPN that will cost less than $10 a month if you leave it on all the time, and even less if you shut it down when not using the VPN. The only variable cost is bandwidth, which will depend on what you use the VPN for.
Deploying OpenVPN to Azure is a cinch. All you need is an active Azure subscription and click the button below.
This will take you to a form to fill out.
Lastly, agree to the Terms and Conditions and click Purchase. Wait until the deployment finishes.
What this button does behind the scenes is creates a B-Series VM on Azure and installs OpenVPN on the machine for you. This is performed by automation scripts for Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and shell scripts on the VPN server. If you’re interested in these, check them out here.
For the ultimate cost savings, shutdown the VPN VM when you’re not using the VPN. Azure only bills for storage when the VM is not running.
You can start and stop the VPN easily in the Azure portal.
For convenience though, using the Azure Mobile App for iOS or Android is simple. Install the App and login. In the list of resources, find openvpnVM and tap on it. On this panel, you can stop and start the VM. You can start the VPN from the app before you logon to the VPN and once you’re done using the VPN, shut it down.
Also, star the VM so it will appear on your list of Favorites for quick access.
That’s it! You private VPN is ready to go. Happy safe browsing!
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