Item: Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

An AWS VPC is in use by default when you create your first account. The VPC is a virtual network within your deployment at AWS. As with any network, you should split up your resources into multiple networks for segmentation/isolation/protection of resources. Through the use of VPCs, we were able to successfully divide up our resources into logically separated areas, providing access to areas based on the role of the user/application/system, instead of full access across the board.

Pros and Cons

Protection of resources based on how roles/access should be allocated.
Easy to allocate network CIDR block and split up as needed for IP subnets within the VPC.
Used to create public and private networks within the VPC.

The biggest issue with VPC networks is knowing how you can leverage VPC endpoints to ensure your resources within the VPC are not reaching out over the Internet to get to AWS services such as S3 and others.

Return on Investment

AWS VPCs are actively used for following various compliance and regulatory needs such as network separation for PCI DSS. The ability to keep resources and access to those resources controlled through the initial steps of creating VPCs has helped tremendously.

Alternatives Considered

Azure Virtual Network

We utilize both AWS and Azure resources for our cloud deployments. The deployment of resources initially was smoother through AWS VPC due to their powerful CLI and Powershell cmdlets. In the past couple of years, the differences between some of the features of AWS VPC and Azure Vnet have diminished. However, the ease of putting things together in a logical flow still belongs in my opinion to AWS.

Key Insights

Do you think Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)'s feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Azure Virtual Network, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudFormation, AvePoint Cloud Backup for Office 365

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are going to deploy within AWS, you need to know how to leverage VPCs. VPCs have several items you must configure for them to be usable and to even link one VPC to another. If you are only going to deploy a few resources or use some of the default configurations, you still need to have working knowledge of how a VPC functions. If you are used to working with VLANs and the ideology behind those, that is the best direct reference to how a VPC can be described, but with additional layers on top of that with route tables, internet gateways, etc.

The framework for AWS starts with a VPC

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)