Understanding the Amazon Web Services VPC Peering
Enterprises throughout the world are moving their workloads and applications to the cloud. Many enterprises use more than one cloud provider, and there are many different reasons that drive this decision, whether it is behind a single or multi-region architecture.
But what are your Paybacks of Creating a Peering Connection Between Cloud Regions?
An Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a private portion of the Amazon Cloud with its own networking environment and gateways to the Internet. VPC Peering supports the outset of one-to-one networking connections within two or more VPCs within two different AWS accounts, or the one in the same AWS Region.
What is VPC Peering?
Amazon VPC enables you to launch AWS resources into a virtual network. VPC can communicate with each other as if they are within the same network. You can build a VPC peering connection between your own VPCs, or with a VPC in another AWS account. The VPCs can be in different regions.
AWS uses the current infrastructure of a VPC to build a VPC peering connection. It is not a gateway or a VPN connection, and it does not have a distinct piece of physical hardware. There is no single point failure for communication or bandwidth block.
With the primer of VPC peering features, life is at ease for AWS users. With the support of VPC peering connectivity, you will be able to connect two Amazon VPCs, which would then enable you to route traffic between them with the aid of private IP addresses.
VPC Peering Use Cases
- Big organizations having multiple Amazon VPCs which are running in a single region with interconnected applications requiring private and secure access inside AWS.
- Some huge organizations having different AWS accounts for several business departments, where at times the systems which have to be deployed in different AWS accounts by some business units are required to be shared or used privately.
- To achieve an integrated access to systems, the customer can peer their VPC with their core suppliers.
Advantages
Saves time as you don’t need to spin up a new database instance into a different VPC. The applications in different VPCs can access databases with ease.
VPC peering does not take in any additional cost.
Easy to configure, you just have to make accesses on each VPC’s routing tables
Reliable, as you don’t need to worry about connectivity issues as it will use AWS low latency networks.
Inter-Region VPC Peering allows VPC Resources like
EC2 instances
RDS databases
Lambda functions
Data transferred across Inter-Region VPC Peering connections are charged at the standard inter-region data transfer rates.
Benefits of Inter-region VPC Peering
Horizontally scaled
Encrypts inter-region traffic
Highly available
No single point of failure or bandwidth block
Traffic always stays on the global AWS support and never passes through the public internet
Reduces threat vectors, such as common exploits and DDoS attacks
Inter-Region VPC Peering Availability
US East (N. Virginia)
US East (Ohio)
US West (Oregon)
EU (Ireland)
