AWS Networking: What is a VPC?

A VPC, which stands for Virtual Private Cloud, is a logical construct that gives your servers and applications a common networking and security boundary. It closely resembles a traditional network that you'd operate in your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

With VPCs, you have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP addresses, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways.

A VPC can be completely isolated and self-contained, with the EC2 instances (virtual machines on AWS) only able to communicate with each other inside the VPC. You have complete control over how the instances access resources outside the VPC. You enable internet connectivity by attaching an internet gateway to the VPC and associating a public IP address with the instance.

You can optionally connect a VPC to your own corporate data center or home network using an IPsec AWS Site-to-Site VPN connection, making the AWS Cloud an extension of your home network or data center.

You can also create a VPC peering connection between two VPCs to route traffic between them privately, so that instances in either VPC can communicate with each other as if they were within the same network.

Every VPC spans a single region. This way, you can be sure that the instances inside a VPC are all physically located in that region and that all communication between these instances doesn't leave the region.