In this AWS VPC tutorial, we will see an introduction to AWS VPC. We will also look at some of the key features of Amazon VPC.

What is AWS VPC?

AWS VPC or Virtual Private Cloud is an Amazon service that allows you to create you own virtual network inside Amazon cloud and to use this virtual network to launch amazon resources. You can think of a VPC as your own network of machines and databases that live completely inside Amazon’s infrastructure but can be managed as if they were in your own data center. Here’s a diagram of a how a typical VPC setup looks like

Features of AWS VPC

AWS VPC allows you to do the following. Not that this is not an exhaustive list, but highlights the important features:

• Create multiple Virtual networks (VPC) inside Amazon cloud.
• The VPC can span multiple regions and availability zones.
• Create multiple subnets within each VPC. Each subnet, however, can be in only one availability zone.
• The subnet can be private (not publicly accessible) or public (publicly accessible). The private subnet generally does not have public IP addresses.
• Manage access to the subnet using route tables and Access control list.
• Create Internet gateways to allow a subnet to be publically accessible.
• Add NAT gateways to allow a private subnet to access the internet.
• Create elastic IPs to attach to NAT gateways or other instances
• Allow connection between two VPC using VPC peering.
• Allow a secured private connection between a VPC and your own data center using a secured VPN connection. The secured connection as three parts:
  1. A VPN gateway in VPC
  2. The actual VPN connection
  3. A customer gateway in the customer data center

This was just an introductory tutorial on Amazon VPC. In the next tutorial, we will look at how to create private and public subnets, add an internet gateway and add a NAT gateway.