Understand Amazon VPC

Learn the fundamentals of Amazon VPC.

We'll cover the following

Introduction

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is an AWS-managed service that enables us to build software-defined virtual private networks that, unless specifically configured otherwise, are logically separated from other networks. Using Amazon VPC, we can build our own private networks to deploy our workloads as needed, without having to manage additional physical networking or hardware necessary for a comparable self-managed physical network.

Production workloads must be hosted and delivered in a secure environment for any business. Amazon VPC assists in defining the private networking environment where the resources required for the workloads can be placed, such as EC2 virtual machines, RDS instances, etc.

While we’re responsible for managing the security and traffic flow to and from the VPC network we create for our workloads, AWS handles the security of the physical hardware and networking involved in building a VPC and its related resources.

Important points

  1. Amazon VPC is a regional service because it can only be created within an AWS Region in an AWS account. Being a region-resilient service, Amazon VPC will also fail if the chosen AWS Region fails in the event of an AWS Region failure.

  2. Before creating a VPC, a network CIDR block must be provided; this allows the remainder of the infrastructure within a VPC to be configured accordingly using the IP addresses within the chosen network address block.

  3. A VPC can be further divided into smaller networks by creating subnets.

  4. The VPC creation limit is five VPCs per Region per AWS account, which can be increased by requesting a limit increase.

  5. The default limit for subnet creation is 200 per VPC per AWS account, which can be increased by requesting a limit increase.

  6. VPCs are classified into two types: default VPCs and nondefault VPCs.

Pricing

While utilizing and creating an Amazon VPC is free, using other AWS services inside of an Amazon VPC is subject to the cost of those services. It is always advised to plan in advance by generating a billing estimate using the AWS Pricing Calculator.