Hello and welcome to this lecture where I want to talk about what AWS PrivateLink is and what it could be used for. I'd like to begin this lecture with a semi-fictitious conversation I recently had with a customer of mine. I was told that my assistance was needed to build a site-to-site VPN tunnel from one AWS customer to another. When I asked why the VPN was needed, the reply was, our organization needs to read data from a server contained within a remote VPC, and we must do this using private IP addressing. I thanked my customer for the clarification and then I asked, "Have you considered using AWS PrivateLink for this?"

The response; what is AWS PrivateLink? AWS PrivateLink, as a service, involves two entities; Service Providers and Service Consumers. Service Providers are those organizations responsible for offering a service. Service Consumers are those organizations that consume the services offered by the Service Provider.

So, what is AWS PrivateLink? PrivateLink is an AWS capability that enables AWS-based service providers to create and offer endpoint services to their consumers privately and securely using the AWS global network as opposed to the public Internet. In general, AWS PrivateLink has three primary use cases. One, many AWS partners such as Datadog, MongoDB, NetApp, Snowflake, and Salesforce provide services to their customers on AWS. AWS PrivateLink allows customers to access services provided by PrivateLink service providers without requiring any public Internet connectivity. Additionally, PrivateLink service connections can only be initiated by the service consumer. 

Thus, the consumer is safeguarded against unwanted communication from the service provider. Two, since the Amazon network is subject to strong controls to meet the highest possible security and compliance standards, PrivateLink can be used as a means to maintain regulatory compliance by keeping sensitive data from traversing the public Internet. Three, as it relates to hybrid cloud migrations, PrivateLink enables on-premises resources the ability to connect to AWS service endpoints over an AWS Direct Connect or VPN.