Networking

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Learning Path

AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty Certificate
~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Learning Path

I recently certified/recertified for the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01). Frankly, Networking is something that I am still diving deep into and I just about managed to get through. So a word of caution, this exam is inline or tougher than the professional exams, especially for the reason that some of the Networking concepts covered are not something you can get your hands dirty with easily.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Content

  • AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam focuses on the AWS Networking concepts. It basically validates
    • Design and develop hybrid and cloud-based networking solutions by using AWS
    • Implement core AWS networking services according to AWS best practices
    • Operate and maintain hybrid and cloud-based network architecture for all AWS services
    • Use tools to deploy and automate hybrid and cloud-based AWS networking tasks
    • Implement secure AWS networks using AWS native networking constructs and services

Refer to AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty Exam Guide AWS Certified Advanced Networking - Specialty ANS-C01 Exam Domains

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Resources

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Summary

  • Specialty exams are tough, lengthy, and tiresome. Most of the questions and answers options have a lot of prose and a lot of reading that needs to be done, so be sure you are prepared and manage your time well.
  • ANS-C01 exam has 65 questions to be solved in 170 minutes which gives you roughly 2 1/2 minutes to attempt each question. 65 questions consists of 50 scored and 15 unscored questions.
  • ANS-C01 exam includes two types of questions, multiple-choice and multiple-response.
  • ANS-C01 has a scaled score between 100 and 1,000. The scaled score needed to pass the exam is 750.
  • Each question mainly touches multiple AWS services.
  • Specialty exams currently cost $ 300 + tax.
  • You can get an additional 30 minutes if English is your second language by requesting Exam Accommodations. It might not be needed for Associate exams but is helpful for Professional and Specialty ones.
  • As always, mark the questions for review and move on and come back to them after you are done with all.
  • As always, having a rough architecture or mental picture of the setup helps focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able to eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach the right answer or at least have a 50% chance of getting it right.
  • AWS exams can be taken either remotely or online, I prefer to take them online as it provides a lot of flexibility. Just make sure you have a proper place to take the exam with no disturbance and nothing around you.
  • Also, if you are taking the AWS Online exam for the first time try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Topics

  • AWS Certified Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) exam focuses a lot on Networking concepts involving Hybrid Connectivity with Direct Connect, VPN, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect Gateway, and a bit of VPC, Route 53, ALB, NLB & CloudFront.

Networking & Content Delivery

  • Virtual Private Cloud – VPC
    • Understand VPC, Subnets
    • AWS allows extending the VPC by adding a secondary VPC
    • Understand Security Groups, NACLs
    • VPC Flow Logs
      • help capture information about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in the VPC and can help in monitoring the traffic or troubleshooting any connectivity issues
      • NACLs are stateless and how it is reflected in VPC Flow Logs
        • If ACCEPT followed by REJECT, inbound was accepted by Security Groups and ACLs. However, rejected by NACLs outbound
        • If REJECT, inbound was either rejected by Security Groups OR NACLs.
      • Use pkt-dstaddr instead of dstaddr to track the destination address as dstaddr refers to the primary ENI address always and not the secondary addresses.
      • Pattern: VPC Flow Logs -> CloudWatch Logs -> (Subscription) -> Kinesis Data Firehose -> S3/Open Search.
    • DHCP Option Sets esp. how to resolve DNS from both on-premises data center and AWS.
    • VPC Peering
      • helps point-to-point connectivity between 2 VPCs which can be in the same or different regions and accounts.
      • know VPC Peering Limitations esp. it does not allow overlapping CIDRs and transitive routing.
    • Placement Groups determine how the instances are placed on the underlying hardware
    • VRF – Virtual Routing & Forwarding can be used to route traffic to the same customer gateway from multiple VPCs, that can be overlapping.
  • VPC Endpoints
    • VPC Gateway Endpoints for connectivity with S3 & DynamoDB i.e. VPC -> VPC Gateway Endpoints -> S3/DynamoDB.
    • VPC Interface Endpoints or Private Links for other AWS services and custom hosted services i.e. VPC -> VPC Interface Endpoint OR Private Link -> S3/Kinesis/SQS/CloudWatch/Any custom endpoint.
    • S3 gateway endpoints cannot be accessed through VPC Peering, VPN, or Direct Connect. Need HTTP proxy to route traffic.
    • S3 Private Link can be accessed through VPC Peering, VPN, or Direct Connect. Need to use an endpoint-specific DNS name.
    • VPC endpoint policy can be configured to control which S3 buckets can be accessed and the S3 Bucket policy can be used to control which VPC (includes all VPC Endpoints) or VPC Endpoint can access it.
    • Private Link Patterns
  • VPC Network Access Analyzer
    • helps identify unintended network access to the resources on AWS.
  • Transit Gateway
    • helps consolidate the AWS VPC routing configuration for a region with a hub-and-spoke architecture.
    • Appliance Mode ensures that network flows are symmetrically routed to the same AZ and network appliance
    • Transit Gateway Connect attachment can be used to connect SD-WAN to AWS Cloud. This supports GRE.
    • Transit Gateways are regional and Peering can connect Transit Gateways across regions.
    • Transit Gateway Network Manager includes events and metrics to monitor the quality of the global network, both in AWS and on-premises.
  • VPC Routing Priority
  • NAT Gateways
    • for HA, Scalable, Outgoing traffic. Does not support Security Groups or ICMP pings.
    • times out the connection if it is idle for 350 seconds or more. To prevent the connection from being dropped, initiate more traffic over the connection or enable TCP keepalive on the instance with a value of less than 350 seconds.
    • supports Private NAT Gateways for internal communication.
  • Virtual Private Network
    • to establish connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS VPC
  • Direct Connect
    • to establish connectivity between the on-premises data center and AWS VPC and Public Services
    • Direct Connect connections – Dedicated and Hosted connections
    • Understand how to create a Direct Connect connection
      • LOA-CFA provides the details for partners to connect to the AWS Direct Connect location
    • Virtual interfaces options – Private Virtual Interface for VPC resources and Public Virtual Interface for Public Resources
      • Private VIF is for resources within a VPC
      • Public VIF is for AWS public resources
      • Private VIF has a limit of 100 routes and Public VIF of 1000 routes. Summarize the routes if you need to configure more.
    • Understand setup Private and Public VIF
    • Understand High Availability options based on cost and time i.e. Second Direct Connect connection OR VPN connection
    • Direct Connect Gateway
      • it provides a way to connect to multiple VPCs from an on-premises data center using the same Direct Connect connection.
      • can connect to VGW or TGW.
    • Understand Active/Passive Direct Connect 
    • supports MACsec which delivers native, near line-rate, point-to-point encryption ensuring that data communications between AWS and the data center, office, or colocation facility remain protected.
    • Understand Route Propagation, propagation priority, BGP connectivity
      • BGP prefers the shortest AS PATH to get to the destination. Traffic from the VPC to on-premises uses the primary router. This is because the secondary router advertises a longer AS-PATH.
      • AS PATH prepending doesn’t work when the Direct Connect connections are in different AWS Regions than the VPC.
      • AS PATH works from AWS to on-premises and Local Pref from on-premises to AWS
      • Use Local Preference BGP community tags to configure Active/Passive when the connections are from different regions. The higher tag has a higher preference for 7224:7300 > 7224:7100
      • NO_EXPORT works only for Public VIFs
      • 7224:9100, 7224:9200, and 7224:9300 apply only to public prefixes. Usually used to restrict traffic to regions. Can help control if routes should propagate to the local Region only, all Regions within a continent, or all public Regions.
        • 7224:9100 — Local AWS Region
        • 7224:9200 — All AWS Regions for a continent, North America–wide, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa
        • 7224:9300 — Global (all public AWS Regions)
      • 7224:8100 — Routes that originate from the same AWS Region in which the AWS Direct Connect point of presence is associated.
      • 7224:8200 — Routes that originate from the same continent with which the AWS Direct Connect point of presence is associated.
      • No-tag — Global (all public AWS Regions).
  • Route 53
    • provides a highly available and scalable DNS web service.
    • Routing Policies and their use cases Focus on Weighted,  Latency, and Failover routing policies.
    • supports Alias resource record sets, which enables routing of queries to a CloudFront distribution, Elastic Beanstalk, ELB, an S3 bucket configured as a static website, or another Route 53 resource record set.
    • CNAME does not support zone apex or root records. 
    • Route 53 DNSSEC
      • secures DNS traffic, and helps protect a domain from DNS spoofing man-in-the-middle attacks. 
      • Requirements
        • Asymmetric Customer Managed Keys
        • us-east-1 with ECC_NIST_P256 spec
    • Route 53 Resolver DNS Firewall
      • protection for outbound DNS requests from the VPCs and can monitor and control the domains that the applications can query.
      • allows you to define allow and deny list.
      • can be used for DNS exfiltration.
      • supports FirewallFailOpen configuration which determines how Route 53 Resolver handles queries during failures.
        • disabled, favors security over availability and blocks queries that it is unable to evaluate properly.
        • enabled, favors availability over security and allows queries to proceed if it is unable to properly evaluate them.
    • Route 53 Resolver (Hybrid DNS)
      • Inbound Endpoint for On-premises -> AWS
      • Outbound Endpoint for AWS -> On-premises
    • Route 53 DNS Query Logging
      • Can be logged to CloudWatch logs, S3, and Kinesis Data Firehose
    • Route 53 Resolver rules take precedence over privately hosted zones.
    • Route 53 Split View DNS helps to have the same DNS to access a site externally and internally
    • Know the Domain Migration process
  • CloudFront
    • provides a fully managed, fast CDN service that speeds up the distribution of static, dynamic web, or streaming content to end-users.
    • supports geo-restriction, WAF & AWS Shield for protection.
    • provides Cloud Functions (Edge location) & Lambda@Edge (Regional location) to execute scripts closer to the user.
    • supports encryption at rest and end-to-end encryption
    • CloudFront Origin Shield
      • helps improve the cache hit ratio and reduce the load on the origin.
      • requests from other regional caches would hit the Origin shield rather than the Origin.
      • should be placed at the regional cache and not in the edge cache
      • should be deployed to the region closer to the origin server
  • Global Accelerator
    • provides 2 static IPs
    • does not support client IP address preservation for NLB and Elastic IP address endpoints.
    • does not support IPv6 address
    • know CloudFront vs Global Accelerator
  • Understand ELB, ALB and NLB
    • Differences between ALB and NLB
    • ALB provides Content, Host, and Path-based Routing while NLB provides the ability to have a static IP address
    • Maintain original Client IP to the backend instances using X-Forwarded-for and Proxy Protocol
    • ALB/NLB do not support TLS renegotiation or mutual TLS authentication (mTLS). For implementing mTLS, use NLB with TCP listener on port 443 and terminate on the instances.
    • NLB
      • also provides local zonal endpoints to keep the traffic within AZ
      • can front Private Link endpoints and provide static IPs.
    • ALB supports Forward Secrecy, through Security Policies, that provide additional safeguards against the eavesdropping of encrypted data, through the use of a unique random session key.
    • Supports sticky session feature (session affinity) to enable the LB to bind a user’s session to a specific target. This ensures that all requests from the user during the session are sent to the same target. Sticky Sessions is configured on the target groups.
  • Gateway Load Balancer – GWLB
    • helps deploy, scale, and manage virtual appliances, such as firewalls, IDS/IPS systems, and deep packet inspection systems.
  • Athena integrates with S3 only and not with CloudWatch logs.
  • Transit VPC
    • helps connect multiple, geographically disperse VPCs and remote networks in order to create a global network transit center.
    • Use Transit Gateway instead now.
  • Know CloudHub and its use case

Security

  • AWS GuardDuty
    • managed threat detection service
    • provides Malware protection
  • AWS Shield
    • managed DDoS protection service
    • AWS Shield Advanced provides 24×7 access to the AWS Shield Response Team (SRT), protection against DDoS-related spike, and DDoS cost protection to safeguard against scaling charges.
  • WAF as Web Traffic Firewall
    • helps protect web applications from attacks by allowing rules configuration that allow, block, or monitor (count) web requests based on defined conditions.
    • integrates with CloudFront, ALB, API Gateway to dynamically detect and prevent attacks
  • Network Firewall
  • AWS Inspector
    • is a vulnerability management service that continuously scans the AWS workloads for vulnerabilities

Monitoring & Management Tools

  • Understand AWS CloudFormation esp. in terms of Network creation.
    • Custom resources can be used to handle activities not supported by AWS
    • While configuring VPN connections use depends_on on route tables to define a dependency on other resources as the VPN gateway route propagation depends on a VPC-gateway attachment when you have a VPN gateway.
  • AWS Config
    • fully managed service that provides AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security, compliance, and governance.
    • can be used to monitor resource changes e.g. Security Groups and invoke Systems Manager Automation scripts for remediation.
  • CloudTrail for audit and governance

Integration Tools

Networking Architecture Patterns

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Specialty (ANS-C01) Exam Day

  • Make sure you are relaxed and get some good night’s sleep. The exam is not tough if you are well-prepared.
  • If you are taking the AWS Online exam
    • Try to join at least 30 minutes before the actual time as I have had issues with both PSI and Pearson with long wait times.
    • The online verification process does take some time and usually, there are glitches.
    • Remember, you would not be allowed to take the take if you are late by more than 30 minutes.
    • Make sure you have your desk clear, no hand-watches, or external monitors, keep your phones away, and nobody can enter the room.

Finally, All the Best 🙂

Google Kubernetes Engine Networking

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil

Google Kubernetes Engine – Networking

IP allocation

Kubernetes uses various IP ranges to assign IP addresses to Nodes, Pods, and Services.

  • Node IP
    • Each node has an IP address assigned from the cluster’s VPC network.
    • Node IP provides connectivity from control components like kube-proxy and kubelet to the Kubernetes API server.
    • Node IP is the node’s connection to the rest of the cluster.
  • Pod CIDR or Address Range
    • Each node has a pool of IP addresses that GKE assigns the Pods running on that node (a /24 CIDR block by default).
  • Pod Address
    • Each Pod has a single IP address assigned from the Pod CIDR range of its node.
    • Pod IP address is shared by all containers running within the Pod and connects them to other Pods running in the cluster.
  • Service Address Range
    • Each Service has an IP address, called the ClusterIP, assigned from the cluster’s VPC network.
  • For Standard clusters
    • a maximum of 110 Pods can run on a node with a /24 range, not 256 as you might expect. This provides a buffer so that Pods don’t become unschedulable due to a transient lack of IP addresses in the Pod IP range for a given node.
    • For ranges smaller than /24, roughly half as many Pods can be scheduled as IP addresses in the range.
  • Autopilot clusters can run a maximum of 32 Pods per node.

GKE Cluster Networking Types

  • GKE, clusters can be distinguished according to the way they route traffic from one Pod to another Pod.
    • VPC-native cluster: A cluster that uses alias IP address ranges
    • Routes-based cluster: A cluster that uses custom static routes in a VPC network

VPC-Native Clusters

  • VPC-native cluster uses alias IP address ranges
  • VPC-native is the recommended network mode for new clusters
  • VPC-native clusters have several benefits:
    • Pod IP addresses are natively routable within the cluster’s VPC network and other VPC networks connected to it by VPC Network Peering.
    • Pod IP address ranges, and subnet secondary IP address ranges in general, are accessible from on-premises networks connected with Cloud VPN or Cloud Interconnect using Cloud Routers.
    • Pod IP addresses are reserved in the VPC network before the Pods are created in the cluster. This prevents conflict with other resources in the VPC network and allows you to better plan IP address allocations.
    • Pod IP address ranges do not depend on custom static routes and do not consume the system-generated and custom static routes quota. Instead, automatically generated subnet routes handle routing for VPC-native clusters.
    • Firewall rules can be created that apply to just Pod IP address ranges instead of any IP address on the cluster’s nodes.

VPC-Native Clusters IP Allocation

Google Kubernetes Engine Networking VPC-Native Cluster IP Management

  • VPC-native cluster uses three unique subnet IP address ranges
    • Subnet’s primary IP address range for all node IP addresses.
      • Node IP addresses are assigned from the primary IP address range of the subnet associated with the cluster.
      • Both node IP addresses and the size of the subnet’s secondary IP address range for Pods limit the number of nodes that a cluster can support
    • One secondary IP address range for all Pod IP addresses.
      • Pod IP addresses are taken from the cluster subnet’s secondary IP address range for Pods.
      • By default, GKE allocates a /24 alias IP range (256 addresses) to each node for the Pods running on it.
      • On each node, those 256 alias IP addresses support up to 110 Pods.
      • Pod Address Range cannot be changed. If exhausted,
        • a new cluster with a larger Pod address range must be created or
        • node pools should be recreated after decreasing the --max-pods-per-node for the node pools.
    • Another secondary IP address range for all Service (cluster IP) addresses.
      • Service (cluster IP) addresses are taken from the cluster’s subnet’s secondary IP address range for Services.
      • Service address range should be large enough to provide addresses for all the Kubernetes Services hosted in the cluster.
  • Node, Pod, and Services IP address ranges must all be unique and subnets with overlapping primary and secondary IP addresses cannot be created.

Routes-based Cluster

  • Routes-based cluster that uses custom static routes in a VPC network i.e. it uses Google Cloud Routes to route traffic between nodes
  • In a routes-based cluster,
    • each node is allocated a /24 range of IP addresses for Pods.
    • With a /24 range, there are 256 addresses, but the maximum number of Pods per node is 110.
    • With approximately twice as many available IP addresses as possible Pods, Kubernetes is able to mitigate IP address reuse as Pods are added to and removed from a node.
  • Routes-based cluster uses two unique subnet IP address ranges
    • Subnet’s primary IP address range for all node IP addresses.
      • Node IP addresses are taken from the primary range of the cluster subnet
      • Cluster subnet must be large enough to hold the total number of nodes in your cluster.
    • Pod address range
      • A routes-based cluster has a range of IP addresses that are used for Pods and Services
      • Last /20 (4096 addresses) of the Pod address range is used for Services and the rest of the range is used for Pods
      • Pod address range size cannot be changed after cluster creation. So ensure that a large enough Pod address range is chosen to accommodate the cluster’s anticipated growth during cluster creation
  • Maximum number of nodes, Pods, and Services for a given GKE cluster is determined by the size of the cluster subnet and the size of the Pod address range.

Related Reads

GCP Certification Exam Practice Questions

  • Questions are collected from Internet and the answers are marked as per my knowledge and understanding (which might differ with yours).
  • GCP services are updated everyday and both the answers and questions might be outdated soon, so research accordingly.
  • GCP exam questions are not updated to keep up the pace with GCP updates, so even if the underlying feature has changed the question might not be updated
  • Open to further feedback, discussion and correction.

 

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality (ANS-C00) Exam Learning Path

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 29 Comments

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality (ANS-C00) Exam Learning Path

I recently cleared the AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality (ANS-C00), which was my first, en route my path to the AWS Speciality certifications. Frankly, I feel the time I gave for preparation was still not enough, but I just about managed to get through. So a word of caution, this exam is inline or tougher than the professional exam especially for the reason that the Networking concepts it covers are not something you can get your hands dirty with easily.

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality (ANS-C00) exam is the focusing on the AWS Networking concepts. It basically validates

  • Design, develop, and deploy cloud-based solutions using AWS
    Implement core AWS services according to basic architecture best practices
  • Design and maintain network architecture for all AWS services
  • Leverage tools to automate AWS networking tasks

Refer to AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality Exam Guide

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality (ANS-C00) Exam Resources

AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality (ANS-C00) Exam Summary

  • AWS Certified Advanced Networking – Speciality exam covers a lot of Networking concepts like VPC, VPN, Direct Connect, Route 53, ALB, NLB.
  • One of the key tactic I followed when solving the DevOps Engineer questions was to read the question and use paper and pencil to draw a rough architecture and focus on the areas that you need to improve. Trust me, you will be able eliminate 2 answers for sure and then need to focus on only the other two. Read the other 2 answers to check the difference area and that would help you reach to the right answer or atleast have a 50% chance of getting it right.
  • Be sure to cover the following topics
    • Networking & Content Delivery
      • You should know everything in Networking.
      • Understand VPC in depth
      • Virtual Private Network to establish connectivity between on-premises data center and AWS VPC
      • Direct Connect to establish connectivity between on-premises data center and AWS VPC and Public Services
        • Make sure you understand Direct Connect in detail, without this you cannot clear the exam
        • Understand Direct Connect connections – Dedicated and Hosted connections
        • Understand how to create a Direct Connect connection (hint: LOA-CFA provides the details for partner to connect to AWS Direct Connect location)
        • Understand virtual interfaces options – Private Virtual Interface for VPC resources and Public Virtual Interface for Public resources
        • Understand setup Private and Public VIF
        • Understand Route Propagation, propagation priority, BGP connectivity
        • Understand High Availability options based on cost and time i.e. Second Direct Connect connection OR VPN connection
        • Understand Direct Connect Gateway – it provides a way to connect to multiple VPCs from on-premises data center using the same Direct Connect connection
      • Route 53
        • Understand Route 53 and Routing Policies and their use cases Focus on Weighted, Latency routing policies
        • Understand Route 53 Split View DNS to have the same DNS to access a site externally and internally
      • Understand CloudFront and use cases
      • Load Balancer
        • Understand ELB, ALB and NLB 
        • Understand the difference ELB, ALB and NLB esp. ALB provides Content, Host and Path based Routing while NLB provides the ability to have static IP address
        • Know how to design VPC CIDR block with NLB (Hint – minimum number of IPs required are 8)
        • Know how to pass original Client IP to the backend instances (Hint – X-Forwarded-for and Proxy Protocol)
      • Know WorkSpaces requirements and setup
    • Security
      • Know AWS GuardDuty as managed threat detection service
      • Know AWS Shield esp. the Shield Advanced option and the features it provides
      • Know WAF as Web Traffic Firewall – (Hint – WAF can be attached to your CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, API Gateway to dynamically detect and prevent attacks)
    •  

AWS Network Connectivity Options

~ Last updated on : ~ jayendrapatil ~ 3 Comments

AWS Network Connectivity Options

Internet Gateway

  • provides Internet connectivity to VPC
  • is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available component that allows communication between instances in your VPC and the internet.
  • imposes no availability risks or bandwidth constraints on your network traffic.
  • serves two purposes: to provide a target in the VPC route tables for internet-routable traffic and to perform NAT for instances that have not been assigned public IPv4 addresses.
  • supports IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

NAT Gateway

  • enables instances in a private subnet to connect to the internet or other AWS services, but prevents the Internet from initiating connections with the instances.
  • Private NAT gateway allows instances in private subnets to connect to other VPCs or the on-premises network.

Egress Only Internet Gateway

  • NAT devices are not supported for IPv6 traffic, use an Egress-only Internet gateway instead
  • Egress-only Internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that
  • Egress-only Internet gateway allows outbound communication over IPv6 from instances in the VPC to the Internet and prevents the Internet from initiating an IPv6 connection with your instances.

VPC Endpoints

  • VPC endpoint provides a private connection from VPC to supported AWS services and VPC endpoint services powered by PrivateLink without requiring an internet gateway, NAT device, VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect connection.
  • Instances in the VPC do not require public IP addresses to communicate with resources in the service. Traffic between the VPC and the other service does not leave the Amazon network.
  • VPC Endpoints are virtual devices and are horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC components that allow communication between instances in the VPC and services without imposing availability risks or bandwidth constraints on the network traffic.
  • VPC Endpoints are of two types
    • Interface Endpoints – is an elastic network interface with a private IP address that serves as an entry point for traffic destined to supported services.
    • Gateway Endpoints – is a gateway that is a target for a specified route in your route table, used for traffic destined to a supported AWS service. Currently only Amazon S3 and DynamoDB.

VPC Private LinksAWS Private Links

  • provides private connectivity between VPCs, AWS services, and your on-premises networks without exposing your traffic to the public internet.
  • helps privately expose a service/application residing in one VPC (service provider) to other VPCs (consumer) within an AWS Region in a way that only consumer VPCs initiate connections to the service provider VPC.
  • With ALB as a target of NLB, ALB’s advanced routing capabilities can be combined with AWS PrivateLink.

VPC Peering

  • enables networking connection between two VPCs to route traffic between them using private IPv4 addresses or IPv6 addresses
  • connections can be created between your own VPCs, or with a VPC in another AWS account.
  • enables full bidirectional connectivity between the VPCs
  • supports inter-region VPC peering connection
  • uses existing underlying AWS infrastructure
  • does not have a single point of failure for communication or a bandwidth bottleneck.
  • VPC Peering connections have limitations
    • cannot be used with Overlapping CIDR blocks
    • does not provide Transitive peering
    • does not support Edge to Edge routing through Gateway or private connection
  • is best used when resources in one VPC must communicate with resources in another VPC, the environment of both VPCs is controlled and secured, and the number of VPCs to be connected is less than 10

VPN CloudHub

  • AWS VPN CloudHub allows you to securely communicate from one site to another using AWS Managed VPN or Direct Connect
  • AWS VPN CloudHub operates on a simple hub-and-spoke model that can be used with or without a VPC
  • AWS VPN CloudHub can be used if you have multiple branch offices and existing internet connections and would like to implement a convenient, potentially low cost hub-and-spoke model for primary or backup connectivity between these remote offices.
  • AWS VPN CloudHub leverages VPC virtual private gateway with multiple gateways, each using unique BGP autonomous system numbers (ASNs).

Transit VPC

  • A transit VPC is a common strategy for connecting multiple, geographically disperse VPCs and remote networks in order to create a global network transit center.
  • A transit VPC simplifies network management and minimizes the number of connections required to connect multiple VPCs and remote networks
  • Transit VPC can be used to support important use cases
    • Private Networking – You can build a private network that spans two or more AWS Regions.
    • Shared Connectivity – Multiple VPCs can share connections to data centers, partner networks, and other clouds.
    • Cross-Account AWS Usage – The VPCs and the AWS resources within them can reside in multiple AWS accounts.
  • Transit VPC design helps implement more complex routing rules, such as network address translation between overlapping network ranges, or to add additional network-level packet filtering or inspection.
  • Transit VPC
    • supports Transitive routing using the overlay VPN network — allowing for a simpler hub and spoke design. Can be used to provide shared services for VPC Endpoints, Direct Connect connection, etc.
    • supports network address translation between overlapping network ranges.
    • supports vendor functionality around advanced security (layer 7 firewall/Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)/Intrusion Detection System (IDS) ) using third-party software on EC2
    • leverages instance-based routing that increases costs while lowering availability and limiting the bandwidth.
    • Customers are responsible for managing the HA and redundancy of EC2 instances running the third-party vendor virtual appliance

Transit Gateway

Transit Gateway

  • is a highly available and scalable service to consolidate the AWS VPC routing configuration for a region with a hub-and-spoke architecture.
  • is a Regional resource and can connect VPCs within the same AWS Region.
  • TGWs across different regions can peer with each other to enable VPC communications within the same or different regions.
  • provides simpler VPC-to-VPC communication management over VPC Peering with a large number of VPCs.
  • enables you to attach VPCs (across accounts) and VPN connections in the same Region and route traffic between them.
  • support dynamic and static routing between attached VPCs and VPN connections
  • removes the need for using full mesh VPC Peering and Transit VPC

Hybrid Connectivity

AWS Network Connectivity Decision Tree

Virtual Private Network (VPN)

VPC Managed VPN Connection
  • VPC provides the option of creating an IPsec VPN connection between remote customer networks and their VPC over the internet
  • AWS managed VPN endpoint includes automated multi–data center redundancy & failover built into the AWS side of the VPN connection
  • AWS managed VPN consists of two parts
    • Virtual Private Gateway (VPG) on AWS side
    • Customer Gateway (CGW) on the on-premises data center
  • AWS Managed VPN only provides Site-to-Site VPN connectivity. It does not provide Point-to-Site VPC connectivity for e.g. from Mobile
  • Virtual Private Gateway are Highly Available as it represents two distinct VPN endpoints, physically located in separate data centers to increase the availability of the VPN connection.
  • High Availability on the on-premises data center must be handled by creating additional Customer Gateway.
  • AWS Managed VPN connections are low cost, quick to setup and start with compared to Direct Connect. However, they are not reliable as they traverse through Internet.

 

Software VPN

  • VPC offers the flexibility to fully manage both sides of the VPC connectivity by creating a VPN connection between your remote network and a software VPN appliance running in your VPC network.
  • Software VPNs help manage both ends of the VPN connection either for compliance purposes or for leveraging gateway devices that are not currently supported by Amazon VPC’s VPN solution.
  • Software VPNs allows you to handle Point-to-Site connectivity
  • Software VPNs, with the above design, introduces a single point of failure and needs to be handled.

Direct Connect – DX

  • AWS Direct Connect helps establish a dedicated private connection between an on-premises network and AWS.
  • Direct Connect can reduce network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based or VPN connections
  • Direct Connect uses industry-standard VLANs to access EC2 instances running within a VPC using private IP addresses
  • Direct Connect lets you establish
    • Dedicated Connection: A 1G, 10G, or 100G physical Ethernet connection associated with a single customer through AWS.
    • Hosted Connection: A 1G or 10G physical Ethernet connection that an AWS Direct Connect Partner provisions on behalf of a customer.
  • Direct Connect provides the following Virtual Interfaces
    • Private virtual interface – to access a VPC using private IP addresses.
    • Public virtual interface – to access all AWS public services using public IP addresses.
    • Transit virtual interface – to access one or more transit gateways associated with Direct Connect gateways.
  • Direct Connect connections are not redundant as each connection consists of a single dedicated connection between ports on your router and an Amazon router
  • Direct Connect High Availability can be configured using
    • Multiple Direct Connect connections
    • Back-up IPSec VPN connection

LAGs

  • Direct Connect link aggregation group (LAG) is a logical interface that uses the Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP) to aggregate multiple connections at a single AWS Direct Connect endpoint, allowing you to treat them as a single, managed connection.
  • LAGs need the following
    • All connections in the LAG must use the same bandwidth.
    • A maximum of four connections in a LAG. Each connection in the LAG counts toward the overall connection limit for the Region.
    • All connections in the LAG must terminate at the same AWS Direct Connect endpoint.

Direct Connect Gateway

  • is a globally available resource to enable connections to multiple VPCs across different regions or AWS accounts.
  • allows you to connect an AWS Direct Connect connection to one or more VPCs in the account that are located in the same or different regions
  • allows connecting any participating VPCs from one private VIF, reducing Direct Connect management.
  • can be created in any public region and accessed from all other public regions
  • can also access the public resources in any AWS Region using a public virtual interface.

References