This section of the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional learning path introduces you to the core networking concepts and services relevant to the SAP-C02 exam. We start with an introduction to the AWS Virtual Private Network (VPC) and networking services. We then understand the options available and learn how to select and apply AWS networking, DNS, and content delivery services to meet specific design scenarios relevant to the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional exam.
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Learning Objectives
- Get a foundational understanding of VPCs, their security, and connectivity
- Learn about VPC sharing using the AWS Resource Access Manager
- Discover inter-regional and intra-regional communication patterns in AWS
- Learn about AWS Direct Connect, along with its implementation, configuration, and connectivity options
- Understand routing in AWS, including static and dynamic routing
- Understand the basics of networking, including Elastic IP addresses, Elastic Network Interfaces, networking with EC2, VPC endpoints, and AWS Global Accelerator
- Learn about the DNS and content delivery services Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront
Hello and welcome to this lecture covering VPC Endpoints.
VPC Endpoints allow you to privately access AWS services using the AWS internal network instead of connecting to such services via the internet using public DNS endpoints. This means that you can connect to the supported services without configuring an Internet Gateway, NAT Gateway, a Virtual Private Network or a Direct Connect connection.
There are 2 types of VPC Endpoints: Interface Endpoints and Gateway Endpoints.
Interface Endpoints are essentially ENIs that are placed within a subnet that act as a target for any traffic that is being sent to a supported services and operates through the use of PrivateLink. PrivateLink allows a private and secure connection between VPCs, AWS services, and on-premises applications, via the AWS internal network.
As an example of supported services, this list only shows a very small subset of what’s available via an Interface Endpoint.
One point to make is that when an interface endpoint is configured within your chosen subnet, the service that it is associated with is NOT able to initiate a connection through to your VPC, communication across this interface HAS to originate from within your VPC first before a response can be made by the service.
You might be wondering how you connect and make use of the endpoints, and the process is seamless to the end user when working with AWS services. When an interface endpoint is created for a service, a specific DNS hostname is created and is associated with a private hosted zone in your VPC. Within this hosted zone a record set for the default DNS name of the service is created resolving to the IP address of your interface endpoint. As a result, any applications using that service already does not need to be reconfigured, requests to that service using the default DNS name will now be resolved to the private IP address of the interface endpoint and will route through the internal AWS network instead of the internet.
A Gateway Endpoint is a target that is used within your route tables to allow you to reach supported services, currently the only supported services using a Gateway Endpoint are Amazon S3 and DynamoDB, but this like is likely to change over time to please ensure you check the latest supported services.
During the creation of your Gateway endpoint you will be asked which route tables within your VPC should be updated to add the new Target of the gateway endpoint. Any route table selected with then have a route automatically added to include the new Gateway Endpoint. The entry of the route will have a prefix list ID of the associated service (Amazon S3 or DynamoDB) and the target entry will be the VPC Endpoint ID, examples of these are shown on screen. You should also be aware that GateWay Endpoint only works with IPv4.
Danny has over 20 years of IT experience as a software developer, cloud engineer, and technical trainer. After attending a conference on cloud computing in 2009, he knew he wanted to build his career around what was still a very new, emerging technology at the time — and share this transformational knowledge with others. He has spoken to IT professional audiences at local, regional, and national user groups and conferences. He has delivered in-person classroom and virtual training, interactive webinars, and authored video training courses covering many different technologies, including Amazon Web Services. He currently has six active AWS certifications, including certifications at the Professional and Specialty level.