An illustrated guide to Amazon VPCs

35 points by egonschiele 1 month ago | 13 comments
  • MehdiHK 1 month ago
    Not related to VPC, but I'm a big fan of the author. Loved his book "Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People" when it came out a few years ago. If you know anyone struggling with common data structures and algorithms, this book can make it fun for them.
    • egonschiele 1 month ago
      Thank you, I'm glad you liked the book!! That was a fun project, and I learned a lot while writing it.
    • davesmylie 1 month ago
      I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers.

      I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm

      • pram 1 month ago
        It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.
        • pugz 1 month ago
          If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964
          • cmckn 1 month ago
            My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!
            • spwa4 1 month ago
              That's crazy. That would never work unless these are just a VLAN configured on existing switches. Even VXLAN wouldn't be able to do that 5 years ago.
              • UltraSane 1 month ago
                AWS developed their own custom overlay networking system. It embeds tenant IDs into the packets for isolation
                • elchananHaas 1 month ago
                  Running out of IP addresses within that VPC is a real difficulty for services still using it.
              • bspammer 1 month ago
                I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?
              • egonschiele 1 month ago
                Hey everyone, I'm the author. Let me know if you have any questions!
                • sceadu 1 month ago
                  are you planning on turning this into a book also? if so I'd be interested. the blog posts were very helpful :)
                  • egonschiele 1 month ago
                    I've been thinking about it! Maybe a book that covers the basics of putting an app up on AWS... networking, covering the different options such as EC2, ECS, and fargate, plus a bit about load balancers and IAM.
                • v5o 1 month ago
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