Introduction

Welcome to the section on networking in the cloud. While we focus on networking in the context of AWS in this section, the core concepts are provider-agnostic. Networking provides the foundation for creating secure and resilient cloud infrastructure, dictating a deeper understanding of them. To cement that understanding, let’s begin our journey by breaking down the historical context that gave birth to cloud networking in the first place.

Cloud networking

Traditionally, before the clouds took over, the responsibility to manage physical hardware resided with the businesses needing them. As you can imagine, setting up and managing one’s own network was a herculean task. Alternatively, the businesses would often buy hardware servers to manage their application workloads and rely on the internet providers for direct links between those servers. This would again be expensive as the organizations would still need to invest in hardware and keep it up-to-date with the third-party networks.

With the advent of cloud computing and networking, the hassle of setting up and managing our infrastructure has been abstracted away. Cloud networking itself corresponds to the virtual networking components built on top of the physical hardware infrastructure owned and managed by the likes of AWS.

Use case

Consider a multi-national organization having offices in different continents across the globe. The organization requires a global infrastructure that allows connectivity and data sharing securely and efficiently between their offices. The organization can use software-defined logic to define and manage their networking resources, for example, virtual routers, virtual load balancers, and firewalls.

Learning objectives

With the historical context out of our way, we can shift our attention to the actual services that would help us build secure and resilient architectures on AWS. This section focuses on Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which is a managed AWS networking service. But before we do that, let’s look at the objectives for this section:

• Review the basic networking concepts to get started with networking in the wild

• Grasp the theoretical concepts that enable virtual private clouds

• Review AWS VPC and its different options/configurations

Now that we have set the goals for this section, let’s dive right into networking.