Amazon Virtual Private Cloud Reviews

VPC is basically about networking and how you are setting up the networks.

VPC, or Virtual Private Cloud, is like a secure portion of AWS's public cloud. So, if you want to secure your dedicated network areas, we use VPCs. Traffic should be slow, and no unwanted people should enter your network, especially because we work at an enterprise level. That is why we must be thoughtful and careful about using VPCs.

We use VPC as a service provided by AWS. So, Amazon keeps enhancing the product.  

In Amazon VPC, there's a service called VPC Peering, where we can connect multiple VPCs from different accounts. However, AWS also introduced new tools like Transit Gateway, based on the Hub and Spoke model. At a single hub, you can route from multiple locations, and that is more efficient. So, this is how it goes.

The subnetting feature has impacted our network design. So, subnetting is very, very important and crucial when it comes to your infrastructure design and presentation. 

Subnetting is completely crucial. For example, suppose I'm an enterprise customer. I have to be very thoughtful and decide, like, "Okay, how many route tables am I going to have?" Let's say you are company XYZ, and you want to make sure that, out of one million IP addresses, let's say, 50,000 should be on a round table. Also, 50,000 IP addresses should go to external ones, and the rest should be for internal use only. Like, you have other third-party software that you have hosted as an enterprise customer. 

In this case, subnetting plays a vital role. You have to be thoughtful, like, "Okay, are you going to use 32 bits? How many IPs do you want to use?" And you have to be very thoughtful about choosing the application. For example, in Kubernetes, we are very thoughtful about using the IPs. They can easily exhaust the IPs. So we have to be very thoughtful about that. So,  subnet skills play a very vital role.

Whenever we launch an instance, it depends on the requirements of the customers. They might use a default VPC. We always recommend that customers or anyone customize the VPC. We'll want to create a VPC with subnets, routes, and an internet gateway.

We also use the AWS console, GUI, and CloudFormation to set it up. We can also trigger it from Terraform. Three methods we use.

Security groups are very useful. But their effectiveness depends on your specific requirements.

For example, we have a website using HTTP and HTTPS traffic. We configure security groups to allow those ports (80 and 443).

However, if we're configuring something like Grafana and Prometheus, the security groups will be different. Grafana might use port 3000, and Prometheus might use port 9090. These configurations depend on the client's needs.

That's the basic idea, but some applications have standard ports. For instance, Apache uses port 80 for HTTP and 443 for HTTPS. Security groups help secure these applications by controlling access.

We can also use security groups to restrict access to specific IP addresses. For example, instead of opening a port to the entire internet (0.0.0.0/0), we can define specific IP ranges that are allowed to access the instance through that port.

I'm working with EC2 and AWS S3 buckets. I have created an architecture featuring a whole VPC that contains EC2 instances and databases. It is a multi-tier architecture, including components such as security groups handling inbound and outbound traffic. 

I know where to direct the traffic. I have used AWS Guard, AWS Shield, and more in terms of security. I was creating an application for an events company, and we made a VPC with traditional infrastructure. 

We built instances connected via load balancers to manage traffic. We created security groups on different instances, including the EC2 instances using m3.large. We used T2.large for databases, managing traffic for a local infrastructure without needing CloudFront. Traffic was directed from portals to EC2 instance servers, and information was stored in the database. 

We set up lifecycle policies in the database for data retention, moving data to Glacier state when needed using S3 buckets. We transitioned objects from the initial stage to the Glacier stage. Our infrastructure included EC2, a database engine using MySQL, and security measures as described earlier.

In terms of the system, I love the functionality of a NAT Gateway. For instance, when I was using it, it was easy to refuse certain traffic from penetrating into my other availability zone. I had to use a NAT Gateway to transition traffic only to the desired portal. Due to using Amazon VPC, it was reliable, efficient in operations, and cost-effective. 

For scalability, it was beneficial when one instance was down in an availability zone, as we had a standby instance. This ensured that when an availability zone in South Africa went down, another one in the US was available. We used methods like backup, restore, and pilot standby to recover data, and AWS Trusted Advisor guided us on cost optimization. We achieved an average of 70% cost reduction through savings plans for reserved instances and Spot Instances for short-term development servers.

The main use case is that it's a virtual private cloud. We used it to create a private network. We created resources inside our VPC to isolate them from other public resources. 

We can create different subnets, like public and private subnets. We use private subnets to secure our resources and public subnets for publicly accessible resources.

Compared to other clouds, Amazon VPC excels at letting you create your own network and at load balancing. If we have created many resources in a specific Availability Zone, we can create resources in other zones and assign subnets. 

This makes it a good solution for a company network, especially if you need to isolate resources from other companies.

We have hosted 400 applications with the help of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

The product’s most valuable feature is allowing us to control access for specific workloads or traffic within a particular region.

We use separate clusters because we have different environments. Within the VPC, we have isolated subnets, meaning there are only private subnets and no public ones. We use Route 53 for our routing tables. For any traffic that needs to connect to the public internet, we route it through a gateway for security.

Subnetting is beneficial for organization and security. Within our setup, we have multiple VPCs with many different subnets defined by IP range. We use routing tables to control traffic flow between the subnets.

Based on processing data, we find VPC is very important. Every network is isolated from the outside and private as well. 

Our plan involves the provisioning of a private network using a VPC. In this process, we will distinctly segregate private and public components. This includes the creation of private subnets and the integration of services such as Amazon RDS. The implementation of databases, be it for work or other purposes, will occur within these private subnets.

This configuration is designed to cater to various stakeholders—clients, the public, users, and applications. This architectural approach extends beyond public communication.   

So communicating could be within applications and via Net Gateway, or we will use some VPC endpoint as well. So this could be an architecture.

Benefits are like easy to implement, and then it could be cost-saving. And then my clients give a lot of features in that VPC. And then they're giving a lot of security as well for the VPC level. So this could be a benefit for the clients and me.

All our general workloads are being hosted in the AWS public cloud. Our analytics workload is in GCP. We have web servers, application servers, and databases in the general workload. Generally, three-tier architectures are hosted in AWS.

Within the solution, we use an Auto Scaling group to scale our EC2 instances based on CPU utilization or any other parameters we define. For some workloads, we have defined the minimum and maximum number of nodes we want.

We use AWS Firewall Manager. It provides options to control our outbound access. We can whitelist some of the domains that we access. Instead of opening outbound connectivity to the entire world, we are restricting some domains using AWS Firewall Manager, one of the services of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

We divide CIDR into multiple subnets. If we have a three-layer architecture, we dedicate a subnet to the web, application, and database. On the subnet, we host our workload. We define security controls on the subnet or at the instance level. We have NACL in the subnet. In instances, we use security groups, which are like firewalls at the host level.