VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud. VPCs can be considered virtual data centers on the cloud. With Amazon VPC, we can create our own virtual private networks isolated from the rest of the AWS public cloud infrastructure. We have complete control of our virtual private network. We can create our own IP address ranges, public or private subnets, and also configure the route tables and network gateways as per our requirements. We can launch internet-facing instances for web servers into the public subnets and launch non-internet facing instances such as database servers into the private subnets. We can also make use of multiple security mechanisms, such as security groups and network access control lists (NACLs), to secure the incoming and outgoing traffic of the instances within our VPCs.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Creating a VPC in AWS
• Creating subnets in a VPC
• Configuring an internet gateway and a route table for internet access
• Setting up and configuring NAT gateways
• Working with NACLs
• Using a VPC gateway endpoint to connect to S3
• Configuring and using VPC flow logs