What is Amazon VPC?

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network that you’ve
defined. This virtual network closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate in
your own data center, with the benefits of using the scalable infrastructure of AWS.

Features

The following features help you configure a VPC to provide the connectivity
that your applications need:

Virtual private clouds (VPC)

A VPC is a virtual
network that closely resembles a traditional network that you’d operate
in your own data center. After you create a VPC, you can add subnets.

Subnets

A subnet is a range of
IP addresses in your VPC. A subnet must reside in a single Availability Zone.
After you add subnets, you can deploy AWS resources in your VPC.

IP addressing

You can assign IPv4 addresses and IPv6 addresses to your VPCs
and subnets. You can also bring your public IPv4 and IPv6 GUA addresses to
AWS and allocate them to resources in your VPC, such as EC2 instances,
NAT gateways, and Network Load Balancers.

Routing

Use route tables to determine
where network traffic from your subnet or gateway is directed.

Gateways and endpoints

A gateway connects your VPC to
another network. For example, use an internet gateway
to connect your VPC to the internet. Use a VPC endpoint to connect to AWS services privately, without
the use of an internet gateway or NAT device.

Peering connections

Use a VPC peering connection
to route traffic between the resources in two VPCs.

Traffic Mirroring

Copy network traffic from
network interfaces and send it to security and monitoring appliances for
deep packet inspection.

Transit gateways

Use a transit gateway, which
acts as a central hub, to route traffic between your VPCs, VPN connections,
and AWS Direct Connect connections.

VPC Flow Logs

A flow log captures information
about the IP traffic going to and from network interfaces in your VPC.

VPN connections

Connect your VPCs to your on-premises networks using
AWS Virtual Private Network (AWS VPN).

Getting started with Amazon VPC

Your AWS account includes a default VPC in each AWS Region.
Your default VPCs are configured such that you can immediately start launching and connecting
to EC2 instances. For more information, see Get started with Amazon VPC.

You can choose to create additional VPCs with the subnets, IP addresses, gateways
and routing that you need. For more information, see Create a VPC.

Working with Amazon VPC

You can create and manage your VPCs using any of the following interfaces:

• AWS Management Console — Provides a web interface that you can
  use to access your VPCs.

• AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) —
  Provides commands for a broad set of AWS services, including Amazon VPC, and is
  supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux. For more information, see AWS Command Line Interface.

• AWS SDKs — Provides language-specific
  APIs and takes care of many of the connection details, such as calculating
  signatures, handling request retries, and error handling. For more information,
  see AWS SDKs.

• Query API — Provides low-level API actions
  that you call using HTTPS requests. Using the Query API is the most direct way to
  access Amazon VPC, but it requires that your application handle low-level details such as
  generating the hash to sign the request, and error handling. For more information,
  see Amazon VPC actions in
  the Amazon EC2 API Reference.

Pricing for Amazon VPC

There’s no additional charge for using a VPC. There are charges for some VPC components,
such as NAT gateways, IP Address Manager, traffic mirroring, Reachability Analyzer, and Network Access Analyzer.
For more information, see Amazon VPC Pricing.