I ran into an issue recently that made me curious about how other teams manage their deployment timelines. We needed to set up a new cloud environment—specifically an AWS VPC or Azure VNet—for a project. The compute setup went smoothly, but once we started addressing network connectivity, routing, firewall rules, and cross-region access, everything slowed down significantly. Even with some automation tools in place, getting everything fully connected and ready for production took much longer than I anticipated. For teams that handle large enterprise cloud environments, how long does it really take to deploy a new VPC or VNet? Are we talking a few days, or does it still take weeks once networking and security are considered?
5 Answers
Creating a landing zone can really speed up your deployment process. If you haven’t already, check out Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework to streamline your operations.
The overall timeline often hinges on how well your IP addressing was configured initially. I’ve seen cases where mismanaged VNETs took way longer to rebuild than expected—like needing two weeks instead of a projected few minutes just to align everything.
For us, it takes about 20 minutes to run the DevOps pipeline that sets up the spoke. This connects to our hub using AWS or Azure services like VNet peering or transit gateways. The trickier part is managing PR commits for the parameters of the new spoke and navigating change control, which can take several days if we're lucky.
Without knowing the specifics of your setup, it’s tough to give an exact time frame. I usually build in AWS with Terraform, and it's pretty quick on my end, but your experience may differ based on various factors.
It really varies. Sometimes it can take a month just to get approvals for IP ranges and firewall requests, especially in larger environments.
That sounds useful! I'll definitely look into it.