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1.19 Virtual Private Cloud—VPC

“Provision a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define”

VPC Home

VPC Documentation

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) lets you provision a logically isolated section of the AWS Cloud where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define. You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. You can use both IPv4 and IPv6 in your VPC for secure and easy access to resources and applications.

You can easily customize the network configuration of your Amazon VPC. For example, you can create a public-facing subnet for your web servers that have access to the internet. You can also place your backend systems, such as databases or application servers, in a private-facing subnet with no internet access. You can use multiple layers of security, including security groups and network access control lists, to help control access to Amazon EC2 instances in each subnet.

Get started with Amazon VPC

You can automatically provision AWS resources in a ready-to-use default VPC. Configure this VPC by adding or removing subnets, attaching network gateways, changing the default route table, and modifying the network ACLs.

Create additional VPCs from the Amazon VPC page on the AWS Management Console by selecting the "Start VPC Wizard" button. You will be presented with four basic network topologies. Select the one that most closely resembles the network topology that you’d like to create and click the "Create VPC" button. You can then customize the topology further to fit your needs more closely. Shortly after, you can start launching Amazon EC2 instances inside your VPC.

Benefits

Secure

Amazon VPC provides advanced security features, such as security groups and network access control lists, to enable inbound and outbound filtering at the instance and subnet level. In addition, you can store data in Amazon S3 and restrict access so that it’s only accessible from instances inside your VPC. For additional security, you can create dedicated instances that are physically isolated from other AWS accounts, at the hardware level.

Simple

Create a VPC quickly and easily using the AWS Management Console. Select from common network setups and find the best match for your needs. Subnets, IP ranges, route tables, and security groups are automatically created. You spend less time setting up and managing, so you can concentrate on building the applications that run in your VPCs.

Customizable

Control your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways. Customize the network configuration, such as by creating a public-facing subnet for your webservers that has access to the internet, and placing your backend systems such as databases or application servers in a private-facing subnet with no internet access.

Use Cases

Extend your corporate network into the cloud

Move corporate applications to the cloud, launch additional web servers, or add more compute capacity to your network by connecting your VPC to your corporate network. Because your VPC can be hosted behind your corporate firewall, you can seamlessly move your IT resources into the cloud without changing how your users access these applications. You can select "VPC with a Private Subnet Only and Hardware VPN Access" from the Amazon VPC console wizard to create a VPC that supports this use case

Securely connect cloud applications to your datacenter

An IPsec VPN connection between your Amazon VPC and your corporate network encrypts all communication between the application servers in the cloud and databases in your data center. Web servers and application servers in your VPC can leverage Amazon EC2 elasticity and Auto Scaling features to grow and shrink as needed. You can create a VPC to support this use case by selecting "VPC with Public and Private Subnets and Hardware VPN Access" in the Amazon VPC console wizard.

Out-of-band and inline traffic inspection

Amazon VPC traffic mirroring duplicates the traffic, along with full payload data, from elastic network interfaces (ENIs) of EC2 instances, and delivers it to out-of-band monitoring and security analysis tools.

Amazon VPC ingress routing allows you to easily deploy network and security appliances, including third-party offerings, inline to the inbound or outbound Amazon VPC traffic. Inline traffic inspection helps you screen and secure traffic to protect your workloads from malicious actors.


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