What networking elements go into AWS VPC?
Discover the Networking Behind AWS VPC: Uncover the Elements! | Article
Amazon Web Services Virtual Private Cloud (AWS VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to the user’s AWS account. It enables the user to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that the user has defined. A VPC comprises several components, including subnets, route tables, network gateways, security groups, and network access control lists. These components work together to provide users a secure and isolated environment to run their applications and store their data. Additionally, VPC allows users to control access to their resources and connect to on-premise or other VPCs.
AWS and the magic of VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
The components of AWS VPC are essential because they provide the user with the necessary tools to build and manage their virtual network infrastructure. In addition, these components help the user to secure, isolate, and control access to their AWS resources.
Subnets are an essential component of a VPC. They allow users to partition their VPC into smaller network segments and control traffic flow between them. Users can isolate their resources by creating multiple subnets, enforcing network security policies, and implementing network security groups to control inbound and outbound traffic.
Route tables are also an essential component of a VPC. They dictate network traffic flow within a VPC and between different subnets. The user can use route tables to specify the target for network traffic, such as a specific subnet or a virtual private gateway. This allows the user to control and manage the network traffic within their VPC, ensuring their resources are secure and accessible.
Network gateways, such as Internet Gateways, VPN Gateways, and Direct Connect Gateways, are also essential components of a VPC. They provide the user with a way to connect their VPC to the Internet or other VPCs, enabling them to access their resources and control network traffic flow. Network gateways are integrated with the VPC’s route tables to control network traffic flow between the VPC and the Internet or other VPCs.
Security groups and network access control lists (ACLs) are also critical components of a VPC. They control the flow of inbound and outbound network traffic and ensure that only authorised traffic can enter or exit the VPC. In addition, security groups and ACLs can be used to restrict access to specific ports, IP addresses, or subnets. They work together to provide security for the user’s resources.
In conclusion, AWS VPC work together to provide users with a secure, isolated, and flexible virtual network infrastructure. Using these components, the user can control and manage their network traffic, secure their resources, and connect to other networks.
Some interesting facts and statistics about AWS VPC:
- Amazon VPC is one of the most widely used cloud computing services, with millions of active users.
- AWS VPC provides secure and scalable virtual networking for Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources.
- AWS VPC allows customers to launch Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources into a virtual network defined by the customer.
- AWS VPC traffic can be isolated from the public Internet, providing higher security.
- AWS VPC supports both IPv4 and IPv6 address ranges.
- AWS VPC can be extended to remote networks through VPN or AWS Direct Connect.
- AWS VPC offers multiple customer-defined network access control options, including security groups and network ACLs.
- AWS VPC supports many network topologies, including public subnets, private subnets, and hardware VPN connections.
- AWS VPC provides customers with a high degree of network customisation, including support for multiple IP address ranges, network segmentation, and fine-grained access controls.
- AWS VPC is available in multiple regions and Availability Zones, providing customers with high availability and fault tolerance for their network infrastructure.
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In this post, we want to bring you all the networking components of Amazon Web Services (AWS). We will take a closer look at each element, what it does and how it fits the overall Infrastructure. Hopefully, it will answer some of your questions, and by better understanding, you will be tempted to use those services.
Before we go into all the details, we emphasise that a Good Network Design is a foundation for on-premise Data Center infrastructure. The same applies to the Cloud environment (post 10 Top Network Design Best Practices for your Infrastructure). We would also like to highlight that we only concentrate on AWS’s networking and security aspect; any other services are out of scope in this blog.
What is Amazon VPC?
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you’ve defined. This virtual network resembles a traditional network you’d operate in your own data center, and it benefits from using AWS’s scalable infrastructure.
VPC – a Virtual Network dedicated to your AWS account, where you can run multiple networks and isolate them from each other for better security and compliance. Connect your on-premise Data Center and run a Hybrid Network solution. The scalable and agile solution to enhance your business operations.
What is the AWS Region?
AWS has a region concept, a physical location around the World where we cluster Data Centers. We call each group of logical Data Centers an Availability Zone. EacAZsS Region consists of multiple isolated and physically separate AZs within a geographic area. Unlike other cloud users, who often define a region as a single Data Center, the multiple AZ design of every AWS Region offers advantages for customers. Each AZ has independent power, cooling, and physical security connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run multiple AZs to achieve the most increased fault tolerance. As a result, AWS infrastructure regions meet the highest security, compliance, and data protection levels.
AWS provides a more extensive global footprint than any other cloud provider. To support its worldwide footprint and ensure customers are served across the world, AWS is opening new regions rapidly. As a result, AWS maintains multiple geographic Regions, including North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East.
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Availability Zones
An Availability Zone (AZ) is a discrete data centre with wiAZsedundant power, networking, and connectivity in an AWS Region. AZs allow customers to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single data center. All AZ’s in an AWS Region are interconnected with high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, over fully redundant, dedicated metAZsibre providing high-thAZshput, low-latency networking between AZs. All traffic between AZs is encrypted—the network performance of AZs is sufficient to accomplish synchronous replication between AZs. AZs make partitioning applications fAZsigh availability easy. Companies are better isolated and protected from issues such as pAZs outages, lightning strikes, significant earthquakes, and more if an application is parties. AZs are physically separated by a considerable distance, many kilometres, from any other AZ, although all are within 100 km (60 miles) of each other.
‘High-Availability’
Unlike otherAZshnology infrastructure providers, each AWS Region has multiple AZs. As we’ve learned from running the leading cloud infrastructure technology platform since 2006, customers who care about their applications’ availability performance want to deploy these applications across multiple AZs in the same region for fault tolerance and low latency. AZs are connected with fast, private fibre-optic networking, which entails efficiently architect applications that automatically failover between AZs without interruption.
The AWS control plane (including APIs) and AWS Management Console are distributed across AWS Regions and utilise a multi-AZ architecture within each region to deliver resilience and continuous availability. This ensures that customers avoid critical service dependency on a single data center. AWS can conduct maintenance activities without making any vital service temporarily unavailable to any customer.
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Network/Subnets
VPC and Subnet Basics
A virtual private cloud (VPC) is a virtual network dedicated to your AWS account. It is logically isolated from other virtual networks in the AWS Cloud. You can launch your AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, into your VPC.
When you create a VPC, you must specify a range of IPv4 addresses for the VPC in the form of a Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) block; for example, 10.0.0.0/16.
Network Segmentation
Although you are given a ./16 network within your VPC, none needs 65k plus IP address, not even FTSE 100 GIPsl Enterprise business. By saying that, it is good to have more IPs as you can segment them inasmuch smaller subnets – ./24, for instance, giving you 250 plus IPs. This is significant and needs to be set out clearly from the beginning. A good design will help you deploy the services you need and isolate them: web servers, applications, databases and others. Another essential item is not having the same network ranges in the cloud and on-premise networks, which can cause future conflicts.
Private Subnets
Honestly, there are no Private or Public subnets. The term is used to describe – Private Subnets; these permits that are isolated and don’t have access to the Internet or access from the Internet is not allowed to these subnets/networks. Most likely, your database will be on those networks and other secure services.
Public Subnets
Traffic is permitted and filtered from the Internet to Public Subnets/Networks. Hosts within those Networks have Private IP addresses, anIPscess can be routed via Internet Gateways and associated Public IPs (Elastic IP Allocation)
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Isolating Networks
You can run your DB Instances in an Amazon VPC for additional network access control. Amazon VPC enables you to isolate your DB Instances by specifying the IP range you wish to use and connecting to your existing infrastructure. In addition, run infrastructure through an industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. Running Amazon RDS in a VPC lets you have a DB instance within a private subnet. You can also set up a virtual private gateway that extends your corporate network into your VPC and allows access to the RDS DB instance in that VPC.
For Multi-AZ deployments, defining a subnet for all availability zones in a region will allow Amazon RDS to create a new standby in another availability zone should the need arise. You can make DB Subnet Groups collections of subnets that you may want to designate for your RDS DB Instances in a VPC. Each DB Subnet Group should have at least one subnet for every availability zone in a given region. In this case, when you create a DB Instance in a VPC, you select a DB Subnet Group; Amazon RDS then uses that DB Subnet Group and your preferred availabiFinally, city zone to select a subnet and an IP address within that subnet. Amazon RDS creates and associates an Elastic Network Interface to your DB Instance with that IP address.
DB Instances deployed within an Amazon VPC can be accessed from the Internet or Amazon EC2 Instances outside the VPC via VPN or bastion hosts that must be thamustunch in your public subnet. To use a bastion host, you must set up a public subnet with an EC2 instance that acts as an SSH Bastion. This public subnet must have an Internet gateway and routing rules that allow traffic to be directed via the SSH host, which must then forward requests to the privacy of your Amazon RDS DB instance.
DB Security Groups can help secure DB Instances within an Amazon VPC. Network traffic entering and exiting each subnet can be allowed or denied via network ACLs. Finally, your on-premises security infrastructure, including network firewalls and intrusion detection systems, can inspect all network traffic entering or leaving your Amazon VPC via your IPsec VPN connection.
Security Groups for your VPC
A security group acts as a virtual firewall, controlling inbound and outbound traffic. When you launch a VPC, you can assign five security groups to the instance. Security groups act at the instance level, not the subnet level. Therefore, each instance in a subnet in your VPC can be assigned to a different set of security groups.
Suppose you launch an instance using the Amazon EC2 API or a command-line tool and don’t specify a security group. In that case, the instance is automatically assigned to the default security group for the VPCtheIf you launch an instance using the Amazon EC2 console; you can create a new security group, for instance.
For each security group, you add rules that control the inbound traffic to instances and a separate set of rules that control the outbound traffic. This section describes the basic practices you need to know about security groups for your VPC and their practices.
Network Access Control List (NACL)
A Network Access Control List (NACL) is an optional security layer for your VPC that acts as a firewall to control traffic in and out of one or more subnets. To add this layer, you might set up network ACLs with rules similar to those of your security groups.
NACL performs some filtering between networks. However, we strongly recommend deploying a Next-Generation firewall, such as Palo Alto, to achieve granular inspection at all 7x layers within your VPC infrastructure, not to mention traffic from the Internet.
More about Next-Gen Firewalls, dedicated post on this subject
Controlling Routing
Route table — A set of rules, called routes, determines where network traffic is directed.
It gives you a granular way where the traffic can go or influence traffic, which is very useful in segregating Private Networks.
Internet Gateway
An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between your VPC and the Internet.
An internet gateway serves two purposes: to provide a target in your VPC route tables for internet-routable traffic and to perform network address translation (NAT) for instances that have been assigned public IPv4 addresses.
Unlike NAT Gateway, Internet Gateway will permit traffic to your instances in VPC from the Internet.
Egress-only internet gateways
An egress-only internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows outbound communication over IPv6 from instances in your VPC to the Internet. It prevents the Internet from initiating an IPv6 connection with your instances.
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NAT Gateway
You can use a Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway to enable instances in a private subnet to connect to the Internet or other AWS services but prevent the Internet from initiating a connection with those instances. In other words, a session created by a web host will be denied.
This function is beneficial if you want servers -> instances in a Secure/Restricted network to get security updates, patches, and anti-virus updates to be fetched from the Internet.
If you want to understand NAT’ing, please read our post.
Elastic IP address
An Elastic IP address is a static IPv4 address designed for dynamic cloud computing. Using an Elastic IP address, you can mask an instance or software failure by rapidly remapping the address to another instance in your account. An Elastic IP address is allocated to your AWS account and is yours until you release it.
An Elastic IP address is a public IPv4 address accessible from the Internet. If your instance does not have a public IPv4 address, you can associate an Elastic IP address with your instance to enable communication with the Internet. For example, this allows you to connect to your instance from your local computer.
AWS currently does not support Elastic IP addresses for IPv6.
VPN Connections to your AWS Cloud – VPC
AWS Site-to-Site VPN
You can create an IPsec VPN connection between your VPC and remote network. A virtual private gateway or transit gateway provides two VPN endpoints (tunnels) for automatic failover on the AWS side of the Site-to-Site VPN connection. Then, you configure your customer gateway device on the remote side of the Site-to-Site VPN connection.
AWS Client VPN
AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service enabling you to securely access your AWS resources or your on-premises network. With AWS Client VPN, you configure an endpoint to which your users can connect to establish a secure TLS VPN session. This enables clients to access resources in AWS or on-premises from any location using an OpenVPN-based VPN client.
AWS VPN CloudHub
Suppose you have more than one remote network (for example, multiple branch offices). In that case, you can create various AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections via your virtual private gateway to enable communication between these networks.
Third-party software VPN appliance
You can create a VPN connection to your remote network by using an Amazon EC2 instance in your VPC that’s running a third-party software VPN appliance. Unfortunately, AWS does not provide or maintain third-party software VPN appliances; however, you can choose from a range of products offered by partners and open-source communities.
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