The high-level architecture for a typical AWS PrivateLink environment is shown here. On the service providers side, the following steps are taken to create a PrivateLink endpoint service. One, deploy the AWS resources required to support the workload or service that the organization will provide to its customers. Two, PrivateLink services are made available through either a network or a gateway load balancer, thus the provider must create an NLB or GWLB to front-end those services. Three, with the load balancer validated and tested, a PrivateLink service endpoint is created and access is provided to one or many AWS principles. On the service consumer side, a VPC endpoint is created to connect to the service provider. When creating a PrivateLink service endpoint, a service provider has the option to enable or disable the required acceptance for endpoint and enable private DNS name settings.

Let's take a moment to consider the functionality they provide. To control which AWS principles have access to their PrivateLink service endpoints, service providers have the ability to use a combination of permissions and acceptance settings. The service provider assigns permissions to access a PrivateLink service endpoint to an AWS account, ad IAM user, or IAM roles. Beyond permissions, a service provider must also accept or reject the connection request. If the acceptance required option is enabled as shown on the image, the endpoint service is not accessible to a given service consumer until the service provider manually accepts the consumer's endpoint connection request, even if the consumer has the appropriate access permissions. If acceptance required is unchecked, consumer endpoint connection requests are automatically accepted and access to the PrivateLink endpoint service is given to those AWS principles with the appropriate access permissions.

Enabling a private DNS name allows service consumers to connect to the PrivateLink service using a custom and typically friendlier FQDN, such as SaaS service.domain.com. A route 53 private hosted zone is not required to support this functionality. To support a private DNS name, the service provider simply specifies its preferred FQDN when creating the PrivateLink service endpoint. To use the private DNS names specified by the provider, the service consumer enables the private DNS name option when building their service connection.