Hello and welcome to this course which has been designed to to provide you with an understanding of various connectivity options when architecting Amazon Virtual Private Clouds, enabling you to connect your own networks to your AWS infrastructure.

My name is Stuart Scott, and I am the AWS content Director here at Cloud Academy.  Feel free to connect with me to ask any questions using the details shown on the screen, alternatively you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy by sending an e-mail to support@cloudacademy.com where one of our Cloud experts will reply to your question.

This course is intended for Solution Architects who need to plan and design for connecting on-prem networks with your AWS infrastructure.  This course would also be beneficial for anyone looking to take the AWS Certified Networking - specialty certification in AWS.  

As you progress through this guided course, you will be presented with a series of on-demand lessons and hands-on labs allowing you to become proficient in being able to design, implement, and manage network connectivity of your VPCs. As a result, you will gain a greater understanding of the following:

• AWS Transit Gateway, including:

• How to create your own large network topology that uses AWS Transit Gateway to connect multiple VPCs

• When and why it becomes appropriate to transition away from the standard methods of VPC peering when connecting large numbers of networks

• How to create attachments and Route Tables for your AWS Transit Gateway

• How to configure VPC route tables for use with your AWS Transit Gateway

• How to observe AWS Transit Gateway traffic using flow logs

• We will also cover Direct connect and learn:

• What AWS Direct Connect is, and why it’s needed

• AWS Direct Connect architecture and prerequisites

• How AWS Direct Connect is billed

• The AWS Direct Connect connection process

• Public, Private, and Transit Virtual Interfaces (VIFs)

• AWS Direct Connect advanced connectivity

• It also covers IPSec and VPNs, and here you’ll understand:

• The IPsec security framework

• Authentication Headers

• Encapsulating Security Payloads

• Security Associations

• IKE phase 1 and phase2, and both Transport mode and Tunnel Mode

• Where and how IPsec VPNs are created within AWS VPCs

• How to connect on-premises networks to Amazon VPCs using Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) virtual private network (VPN) tunnels

• How to configure internal Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) on on-premises routers

• Understand the differences between static and dynamic routing

• Gain experience with multi-homed instances and understand some reasons for using them

• Encryption for data in transit using VPN and Direct Connect connections

• Using IPsec security to configure encryption

• Network costs can be expensive, so you’ll also discover:

• The costs of connectivity services like Direct Connect, Site-to-Site VPN, and Transit Gateway

• How to select the most cost-effective connectivity option considering your business requirements

As a prerequisite, you may find it beneficial in having some familiarity with the fundamentals of VPCs, and some of its components Feedback on our content here at Cloud Academy is valuable to both us as trainers and any students looking to take the same course in the future. If you have any feedback, positive or negative, it would be greatly appreciated if you could contact support@cloudacademy.com.

Please note that, at the time of writing this content, all information was accurate.  AWS implements hundreds of updates every month as part of its ongoing drive to innovate and enhance its services.

As a result, minor discrepancies may appear in the course content over time.  Here at Cloud Academy, we strive to keep our content up to date in order to provide the best training available. 

So, if you notice any information that is outdated, please contact support@cloudacademy.com.  This will allow us to update the course during its next release cycle. Thank you!