VPC is a cornerstone of any complex AWS based infrastructure. And of simpler ones too, actually. In fact, the very moment you open your AWS account, a minimal VPC with just one subnet is automatically created for you, making the old distinction between EC2-Classic and EC2-VPC instances now quite obsolete. You don’t need to have a deep knowledge of VPC if you want to launch your instances or your RDS databases, but as soon as you start working on something slightly more complex than that, you will definitely need to configure your VPC to do some serious networking.

VPC is not an easy service though. Networking never is, isn’t it? That’s why we thought to create a series of courses to help you get started with VPC and become a proficient user. Today we just published the first course of this VPC series, Understanding VPC. It will bring you from zero to creating your first virtual Internet in less than an hour, and will also explain you some networking concepts that you will need to know to really get the hang of how VPC does what it does.



The first lecture introduces you to the whole course and will help you understand what VPC is for. You’ll like the smooth presentation of the whole service that our expert David Clinton provided here. Then, time to get your hands dirty with the AWS console: David will drive you through the process of creating a brand new VPC for your account. The following lectures are two quite important ones. Our teacher will teach you everything you need to know about subnetting, including the common CIDR notation that is used so widely across VPC (and across the Internet in general, by the way), and about Internet Gateways and Route Tables.

Then, time for some talk about security. Misconfiguring a VPC can be disastrous, so David, which is an experienced Linux System Administrator, will give you some good hints to secure your VPC and prevent undesired guests to exploit your vulnerabilities. The final lecture is a recap of the whole course, this time with a quite practical approach: the instructor will show you how to create a private Virtual Intranet for your organization by using VPC.



This is an intermediate course, so I recommend you to tackle it only if you have some basic knowledge about AWS already. Particularly, you should be familiar with at least the basic concepts about TCP/IP to better understand the content of this course. As always, feel free to make full use of Cloud Academy’s AWS Learning Paths and AWS Quizzes if you need to improve your knowledge or if you want some great followups after watching this course.