Amazon Virtual Private Cloud or VPC, as it is popularly known, is a logically separated, isolated, and secure virtual network on the cloud, where you provision your infrastructure, such as Amazon RDS instances and Amazon EC2 instances. It is a core component of networking services on AWS cloud.
A VPC is dedicated to your AWS account. You can have one or more VPCs in your AWS account to logically isolate your resources from each other. By default, any resource provisioned in a VPC is not accessible by the internet unless you allow it through AWS-provided firewalls. A VPC spans an AWS region.
VPC is essentially your secure private cloud within AWS public cloud. It is specifically designed for users who require an extra layer of security to protect their resources on the cloud. It segregates your resources with other resources within your AWS account. You can define your network topology as per your requirements, such as if you want some of your resources hidden from public or if you want resources to be accessible from the internet.
Getting the design of your VPC right is absolutely critical for having a secure, fault-tolerant, and scalable architecture.
It resembles a traditional network in a physical data center in many ways, for example, having similar components such as subnets, routes, and firewalls; however, it is a software-defined network that performs the job of data centers, switches, and routers. It is primarily used to transport huge volume of packets into, out of, and across AWS regions in an optimized and secured way along with segregating your resources as per their access and connectivity requirements. And because of these features, VPC does not need most of the traditional networking and data center gear.
VPC gives you granular control to define what traffic flows in or out of your VPC.
In this lesson, we will deep dive into the security of AWS VPC. VPC is the most important component of networking services in AWS. Networking services are one of the foundation services on the AWS cloud. A secure network is imperative to ensure security in AWS for your resources.
We will look at components that make up VPC, such as subnets, security groups, various gateways, and so on. We will take a deep dive into the AWS VPC features and benefits such as simplicity, security, multiple connectivity options, and so on.
We will look at the following most popular use cases of VPC that use various security and connectivity features of VPC:
- Hosting a public-facing website
- Hosting multi-tier web applications
- Creating branch office and business unit networks
- Hosting web applications in AWS cloud that are connected with your data center
- Extending corporate network on the cloud
- Disaster recovery
AWS provides multiple measures to secure resources in VPC and monitor activities in VPC, such as security groups, network access control list (ACL), and VPC flow logs. We will dive deep into each of these measures.
Next, we'll walk through the process of creating a VPC. You can either choose to create a VPC through the wizard, through the console, or through the CLI.
Furthermore, we'll go through the following VPC connectivity options along with VPC limits in detail:
- Network to AWS VPC
- AWS VPC to AWS VPC
- Internal user to AWS VPC
We'll wrap up this lesson with VPC best practices.
Throughout this lesson, we'll take a look at AWS architecture diagrams for various use cases, connectivity options, and features. The objective of this lesson is to familiarize you with AWS VPC and let you know about ways to secure your VPC.