Amazon Web Services Transit vpc: Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and networks can be connected to each other and other non-AWS infrastructures using the Amazon Web Services VPC i.e. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud. Before we go on any further, you should know what exactly an Amazon VPC is.
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud allows you to allocate a section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud which is logically isolated. The AWS Cloud allows you to launch AWS resources in a virtually defined network. This way the customer has total control over the networking environment, meaning you can create subnets, select your IP address range, configure route tables, network gateways and so on. So you can customize the networking configuration for your Amazon Web Services Transit vpc. Other than that, Amazon VPC is secure, simple, scalable and reliable in all terms.
Amazon Web Service Transit VPC: how it works
Amazon VPC also enables the customers to create some virtual networks. Now you can connect these networks to each other using a transit VPC. Here’s how it works. You create a transit VPC which then serves as a global network transit center. It reduces the number of connections needed to connect multiple networks and simplifies network management. Since this design of the transit VPC doesn’t require an establishment of a physical presence in a colocation hub or deployment of a physical network gear, it saves time and efforts while minimizing the expenses.
You create a transit VPC which then serves as a global network transit center. It reduces the number of connections needed to connect multiple networks and simplifies network management. Since this design of the Amazon Web Services transit VPC doesn’t require an establishment of a physical presence in a colocation hub or deployment of a physical network gear, it saves time and efforts while minimizing the expenses.
The transit VPC design is a typical hub and spoke network topology where the remote VPC’S access each other and other remote networks through the transit VPC. The design brings forward a solution that we will discuss further in the article, which creates on the AWS Cloud, a Cisco-base transit VPC.
The New AWS Transit VPC solution
Now I would like to tell you about the new Amazon Web Services (AWS) Solution.
This new solution, just like the AWS Quick Starts, was also built by the AWS Solutions Architects. It also incorporates in itself the best practices to ensure high availability and security.
This new Amazon Web Services Transit VPC Solution enables and teaches the customers to implement Transit VPC, which is a critical networking construct. Multiple Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) which might be geographically dissimilar and executing in different AWS accounts can be connected to a typical VPC using the transit C solution.
Here the standard AWS VPC will act as a global network transit center. This network topology, which will use the current VPC as a hub will reduce the number of connections that you’ll require to set up & manage.
This in-turn will make the network management simple. Also since it is implemented virtually, it doesn’t need any physical network gear or a physical presence in a colocation transit hub.
So, if you will look at the network topology, you will see that the transit Amazon Web Services transit VPC will act as a central hub surrounded by corporate data centers, additional spoke VPCs, and other networks.
However, the transit AWS Transit VPC supports the following crucial use cases:
• Private Networking– It is the one where you can build a private network ranges through two or more AWS Regions.
• Shared Connectivity– In this one multiple Virtual Private Cloud can share connections to other clouds, neighboring networks, and data centers.
• Cross- Account AWS Usage– The Virtual Private Clouds and the AWS resources within these can exist in multiple AWS accounts.
The solution uses associated AWS Cloud Formation stack to launch and put together all of the AWS resources. It provides you with three throughput choices starting from five hundred Mbps to two Gbps, every choice executed over a pair of connections for top availability.
The stack makes use of the Cisco Cloud Services Router (CSR) that is currently accessible in AWS Marketplace. You’ll be able to use your existing CSR licenses (the BYOL model) otherwise you can pay for the CSR usage on an hourly basis.
The price to run a Amazon Web Services transit VPC relies on the throughput choice and licensing model that you had opted for, and ranges from $0.21 to $8.40 per hour, with an extra price (for AWS resources) of $0.10 per hour for every spoke VPC. There’s an additional cost of $1 per month for an AWS Key Management Service (KMS) client master key that is solution specific. All of these costs are exclusive of transit network prices. The template installs and uses a pair of AWS Lambda functions in a creative way!
The VGW Poller function runs each minute. It scans all of the AWS Regions within the account, searching for suitably tagged Virtual Private Gateways in spoke VPCs that don’t have a VPN connection. Once it finds one, it creates (if necessary) the corresponding client gateway and also the VPN connections to the CSR, and saves info in an S3 bucket.
The Cisco Configurator function is triggered by the Put event on the bucket. It parses the VPN connection info and generates the required configuration files, then pushes them to the CSR instances using SSH. It enables the VPN tunnels to come back up and (via the magic of BGP), neighbor relationships are established with the spoke VPCs.
By using Lambda in such a way, new spoke VPCs can be bought on-line rapidly without the overhead to keep an underutilized EC2 instance up and running.
