Organizations now have better guidance on how to split up Amazon Web Services Inc.’s (AWS) public cloud into virtual personal clouds, where they have complete control over the networking environment.
This guidance is found in the Quick Start Reference Deployment Guide titled Building a Modular, Scalable Virtual Network Architecture With Amazon VPC.
AWS announced Friday that the Quick Start creates a modular Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC environment) on the AWS Cloud to provide virtual networking foundation for your AWS-based deployments. This Quick Start can be used as a foundation for your own deployments. You can scale it by adding or subtracting subnets or Availability Zones, and you can add additional infrastructure components to complete your AWS environment.
Quick Starts’ selling points include modularization and customization of AWS environments, which allow organizations to follow best practices when deploying software to cloud. AWS’ Quick Start Reference Deployments website stated that you can add functionality to them or modify them for your own implementations. Quick Start Reference Deployments can be used for many categories, including DevOps, configuration, security, identity and compliance, Big Data and database security, among others.
The company stated that Quick Starts are automated reference deployments of key workloads on AWS cloud. “Quick Starts launch, configure, and run the AWS network, storage, compute, and other services necessary to deploy a specific workload onto AWS using AWS best practices for security, availability, and availability.
Amazon VPCs allow organizations to provision logically isolated portions of the AWS public clouds in which AWS resources may be launched.
AWS stated on its Amazon VPC website that “you have complete control over virtual networking environment, including selection and creation of IP addresses, subnets, configuration of route tables, and gateway configurations.”
AWS stated that the first set of private networks shares the default network access list (ACL), from Amazon VPC. A second optional set of private network subnets includes dedicated custom network ACLs for each subnet. The Quick Start divides Amazon VPC address space in a predictable fashion across multiple Availability Zones and deploys either outbound Internet access gateways or NAT instances, depending on which AWS Region the Quick Start is deployed in.
AWS stated that the VPC Quick Start is designed for IT infrastructure architects, DevOps engineering engineers, and administrators. It will help them to create AWS networking infrastructure as a baseline for deployments. The Quick Start includes AWS CloudFormation templates to automate the deployment. The company also included a deployment guide that discusses VPC design and provides step by step instructions for setting up your AWS account and deploying Quick Start.