Building My Cloud Computing Foundation with AWS ☁️

Here are some of the key concepts I've learned so far.

A computer network is a group of two or more devices connected to communicate and share resources.Each device on an IP network uses an IP address to identify its network interface. I've also learned about the two main versions of IP addresses:

I've also been learning about CIDR notation and what the number after the / represents when defining a network's address range.

Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) allows you to create a logically isolated virtual network within AWS.

This is where you can launch and organize cloud resources, such as EC2 instances, while controlling how they communicate with each other and the outside world.

EC2 instances launched into a VPC can have private IP addresses that allow them to communicate within the network.

This helps resources communicate using private addressing, although security still depends on configurations such as security groups, network ACLs, and routing.

An Elastic Network Interface is a virtual network interface that can be attached to an EC2 instance in a VPC.

It provides network connectivity and has associated attributes such as private IP addresses and security groups.

These two AWS networking components serve different purposes:

Internet Gateway (IGW): Enables communication between a VPC and the internet when the necessary routing, addressing, and security configurations are in place.

NAT Gateway: Allows instances in a private subnet to initiate connections to external services, such as software update servers, without requiring those instances to have public IP addresses.

Understanding this difference helped me see how AWS networks can be designed to balance connectivity and security.

I also learned that these two features solve different networking problems.

VPC Sharing: Allows multiple AWS accounts within the same AWS Organization to use subnets in a centrally managed VPC.

VPC Peering: Creates a private network connection between two separate VPCs, allowing resources to communicate when routing and security configurations permit it.

This distinction is important when designing cloud environments that involve multiple accounts or networks.