News

AWS Offers Quick Start for Virtual Private Clouds

• By David Ramel
• 07/12/2016

Organizations now have improved guidance for slicing up the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) public cloud into virtual private clouds where they have complete control of the networking environment.

That guidance comes in the new Quick Start Reference Deployment Guide, titled Building a Modular and Scalable Virtual Network Architecture with Amazon VPC.

"This new Quick Start builds a modular Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment on the AWS Cloud to provide a virtual networking foundation for your AWS deployments," AWS said in a blog post on Friday. "You can use this Quick Start as a building block for your own deployments. You can scale it up or down by adding or removing subnets and Availability Zones according to your needs, and add other infrastructure components and software layers to complete your AWS environment."

Modularization and customization of AWS environments are the selling points of Quick Starts, which help organizations follow best practices in deploying software to the cloud. "You can layer additional functionality on top or modify them for your own implementations," AWS said on its Quick Start Reference Deployments site. Quick Start Reference Deployments are available for a number of categories, including DevOps and configuration, compliance, security and identity, database and Big Data, and several more.

"Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key workloads on the AWS cloud," the company said. "Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability."

Amazon VPCs allows organization to provision logically isolated sections of the AWS public cloud in which AWS resources can be launched.

"You have complete control over your virtual networking environment, including selection of your own IP address range, creation of subnets, and configuration of route tables and network gateways," AWS said on its Amazon VPC site.

"The first set of private subnets shares the default network access control list (ACL) from the Amazon VPC, and a second, optional set of private subnets include dedicated custom network ACLs per subnet," AWS said. "The Quick Start divides the Amazon VPC address space in a predictable manner across multiple Availability Zones, and deploys either NAT instances or NAT gateways for outbound Internet access, depending on the AWS Region you deploy the Quick Start in."

AWS said the new VPC Quick Start is aimed at IT infrastructure architects, DevOps engineers and administrators, designed to help them create AWS networking infrastructure to serve as a baseline for deployments. "The Quick Start includes AWS CloudFormation templates that automate the deployment. It also includes a deployment guide, which discusses the VPC design and provides step-by-step instructions for preparing your AWS account and deploying the Quick Start," the company said.