- Welcome to our first lesson on networking services in AWS.
And for this first lesson, we're going to talk about
one of the most commonly used services, the VPC.
So first off, what does VPC stand for?
It is an acronym and it stands for Virtual Private Cloud.
And you can think of it as a sort of
virtual data center network placed in AWS.
For all the services and features
that we're gonna talk about
from now until the end of the course,
I am also going to be adding a scope into our discussion.
The VPC network itself is region scoped,
that means you pick a region
like US-East-1 or AP-Southeast-1
when you create one of these VPC networks.
And this network is used for quite a number of AWS services
and for almost anything that is scoped at the AZ level.
It means that you are likely deploying it
into an actual VPC network.
Now, the first thing to know about a VPC network
when you create it is that you need to provide
a CIDR Address,
that stands for Classless Inter-Domain Routing.
And it is a way of describing a network as well as its size
in a single string of characters.
Now you do not have to provide an outside network address
to work in AWS.
You can bring your own, but AWS also supports
all of the private IP ranges that are documented
in RFC 1918, like 10.0, 172.16, 192.68, and so forth.
Now, an individual VPC also supports
up to five CIDR ranges as long as they're within
the same base range.
So, if you create a new VPC network
and assign 10.0.0.0/16 to it, any other CIDR ranges
that you apply also need to start with 10.
You cannot apply a 172.16.0.0 or a 192.168.0.0.
The largest VPC network that you can create
has a CIDR range of /16, which if you do the binary math,
it means 65,536 IP addresses,
which is large enough for the vast majority of workloads.
The smallest VPC that you can create is a /28,
which is just 16 IP addresses.
But as we're gonna find out when we talk about subnets,
it's actually less than that.
Finally, AWS also supports IPv6 in the VPCs.
And you can simply ask AWS to provide you with a /56 range,
or you can bring your own but only one of these ranges
is supported per VPC network.