Yesterday, Amazon announced a new enhancement to its Elastic Computing Service (EC2), called Virtual Private Cloud, more cloud acronyms!! But what is it?
VPC provides network isolation to virtual servers running in Amazon EC2 cloud. Workloads in VPC do not have any connectivity to the public Internet, instead they have IPSec VPN connectivity to the customers private network.
The virtual servers get a corporate IP address from your range and it even supports DHCP.
To set this up, you use new features of the Amazon API that lets you create a VPC container (a logical construct for the concept of your private cloud), subnets, and gateways. When you actually activate the VPN, you begin paying 5 cents an hour to keep the tunnel up. You pay normal Amazon bandwidth charges on top of that.
When you launch an EC2 instance, you can now specify that it belongs to a particular VPC subnet. That instance is not physically isolated from the rest of EC2; you're still part of the general shared pool of capacity. Rather, the virtual privacy is achieved via Amazon's proprietary networking software, which they use to isolate virtual instances from one another.
VPN connectivity for cloud servers is not a new thing in general, and part of what Amazon is addressing with this release is a higher-security option, for those customers who are uncomfortable with the fact that Amazon, unlike most of its competitors, does not offer a private VLAN to each customer. What distinguishes the Amazon offering is that the provisioning is fully automated, and the technology is proprietary.
Amazon is a top tier strategic partner for Citrix in the Cloud market. Over time, Amazon VPC will enable all Citrix enterprise customers to seamlessly expand their Citrix infrastructures, starting today with XenApp, by adding highly secure and reliable on-demand resources from AWS as a natural extension of their current on-premises Citrix based applications.
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