Hello Community
I'm thrilled to announce that I've successfully completed my AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP) course! This is a huge milestone for me, marking the end of a learning chapter and the start of a new journey toward becoming a Cloud Engineer. Over the past few weeks, I've dived deep into AWS fundamentals and cloud-native services that are crucial for building secure, scalable cloud solutions.
Now that this course is complete, I'm excited to take the next step with hands-on projects across various skill levels:
- Level 100 (Introductory)
- Level 200 (Intermediate)
- Level 300 (Advanced)
- Level 400 (Expert)
These projects will help me apply my knowledge in practical scenarios, giving me real-world experience with AWS services and solutions.
Cloud Native Networking Services
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud where you can launch AWS resources. It allows you to create a private network within AWS, where you can fully control the network configuration, such as selecting IP address ranges, subnets, route tables, and network gateways. The main advantage of a VPC is the ability to segment your network resources logically and enhance security by isolating them from public access.
Internet Gateway (IGW)
An Internet Gateway enables communication between your VPC and the internet. By attaching an Internet Gateway to your VPC, instances within public subnets can send and receive traffic to the internet, enabling services like web hosting or API access.
Route Tables
Route tables contain a set of rules, called routes, that determine where network traffic from your subnets is directed. You can configure route tables to ensure proper routing for internal and external traffic, allowing different parts of your infrastructure to communicate effectively.
Region
AWS regions are geographically isolated areas where your network and compute resources are located. Each region contains multiple Availability Zones, which provide redundancy and failover options.
Availability Zone (AZ)
An AZ is essentially a data center within an AWS region. Resources such as EC2 instances, databases, and storage are deployed across different AZs to improve fault tolerance and minimize downtime.
Subnets
A subnet is a logical partition of a VPC's IP address range into smaller network segments. Subnets allow for the division of network resources into different areas, separating private resources from public-facing ones. Subnets are used to segment your VPC into different zones of control, allowing for public and private network segregation.
Network Access Control Lists (NACLs)
NACLs act as stateless firewalls at the subnet level. They allow or deny traffic at the subnet boundary and provide an additional layer of security, controlling inbound and outbound traffic for specific subnets.
Security Groups
Security Groups act as stateful firewalls at the instance level. These groups control traffic to and from individual resources like EC2 instances, ensuring that only authorized traffic can reach your application services.
Enterprise/Hybrid Networking Services
AWS VPN
AWS provides VPN (Virtual Private Network) solutions to create secure tunnels between your on-premises networks and your AWS VPC. VPN allows your enterprise to connect to AWS securely, enabling a hybrid network setup that spans cloud and on-premise resources.
AWS Direct Connect
Direct Connect is a high-speed, private network connection between your on-premises data center and AWS. This service reduces your dependency on the internet for critical workloads and ensures lower latency, higher bandwidth, and more consistent network performance compared to traditional internet connections.
AWS PrivateLink
PrivateLink allows you to securely access AWS services or your own services on AWS from your VPC without traversing the public internet. This enhances the security of your traffic and ensures it remains within the AWS network, reducing the risks associated with public internet exposure.
VPC and Subnets in Detail
VPC
In AWS, a VPC is a logically isolated section of the AWS network where you can launch your AWS resources. You can choose a range of IPs using CIDR (Classless Inter-Domain Routing) ranges to define your VPC's size. For instance, a CIDR range of 10.0.0.0/16 gives you 65,536 IP addresses to allocate across your subnets and other resources.
Subnets
A subnet is a smaller partition of your VPC's CIDR range. When creating subnets, you assign a portion of your VPC's IP range, ensuring that each subnet has a smaller CIDR range than the VPC. For example, a subnet with a CIDR range of 10.0.0.0/24 can have 256 IP addresses, which are reserved for hosting instances, load balancers, and other network resources.
Public Subnets
These subnets have a direct route to the internet and typically house resources like web servers that need to be accessible to the public.
Private Subnets
Private subnets are isolated from the internet and usually contain backend resources like databases and application servers.
Zero Trust Model
The Zero Trust Model operates on the principle of "trust no one, verify everything." In this security model, no entity, whether inside or outside the network, is trusted by default. All traffic is continuously validated, authenticated, and authorized before access is granted to resources.
In a Zero Trust environment, identity becomes the primary security perimeter. This contrasts with traditional network security models, where the network boundary (firewall) is considered the security perimeter. In AWS, this means leveraging identity and access management (IAM) policies to control who can access what resources, while constantly verifying and monitoring access.
Zero Trust on AWS
In AWS, identity-based security controls play a central role in the Zero Trust model. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is used to define and enforce fine-grained permissions and access policies across all AWS services, ensuring that only authorized users and applications can access specific resources.
VMs vs Containers
In a cloud-native environment, understanding the differences between Virtual Machines (VMs) and Containers is essential.
Virtual Machines (VMs)
These are traditional compute resources where an entire operating system is virtualized. Each VM runs independently and requires a separate guest OS, making VMs more resource-intensive.
Containers
Containers are lightweight and only package the application and its dependencies, sharing the underlying host OS. This makes containers much more efficient and faster to start, making them ideal for microservice architectures.
Microservices vs Monolithic Services
Monolithic Services
In a monolithic architecture, the entire application is built as a single unit. All components (e.g., database access, business logic, UI) are tightly coupled. Scaling monolithic applications is challenging because the whole application must be scaled together, regardless of which part is under load.
Microservices
Microservices break down the application into smaller, loosely coupled services that can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. Each microservice can focus on a specific functionality and can be updated or scaled without affecting other services. This architecture is more resilient and better suited to cloud environments where scalability and agility are key.
AWS Organization Account and Control Tower
AWS Control Tower provides a straightforward way to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment. Control Tower helps you create organizational units, apply policies, and monitor activity across your accounts, ensuring compliance with best practices and security standards.
Serverless Services
AWS offers various serverless services that allow you to run applications and services without managing infrastructure. These services include:
- AWS Lambda: A compute service that runs code in response to events, automatically scaling based on demand.
- Amazon API Gateway: A fully managed service that allows developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs.
- Amazon S3: Object storage built to store and retrieve any amount of data.
Billing and Pricing
AWS provides a pay-as-you-go pricing model. You only pay for what you use, with no upfront costs or long-term commitments. AWS pricing varies by service and is generally based on factors such as:
- Compute: The cost of running instances or serverless functions.
- Storage: The amount of data stored in services like S3 or EBS.
- Data Transfer: Charges based on the amount of data transferred in and out of AWS regions.
By monitoring and optimizing usage, organizations can manage and reduce their AWS costs effectively.
Closure
Week Seventeen has marked a significant milestone in my cloud journey. This period has been crucial for deepening my understanding of cloud networking and security. I've delved into the fundamentals of AWS networking services, including VPCs, subnets, and Internet Gateways, and explored more complex topics such as hybrid networking with AWS VPN and Direct Connect. These lessons have enriched my knowledge on how to design and manage secure, scalable cloud environments effectively.
The exploration of the Zero Trust Model and its application in AWS has been particularly enlightening. It highlighted the crucial role of identity-based security in today's cloud infrastructure, underscoring that trust must be continuously validated rather than assumed.
Furthermore, learning about the distinctions between VMs and Containers, and understanding the shift from monolithic to microservices architectures, has provided valuable insights. These concepts are essential for building efficient, scalable, and resilient applications in the modern cloud-native ecosystem.
As I wrap up this chapter, I'm enthusiastic about applying these concepts in practical scenarios and continuing my journey with hands-on projects in the upcoming weeks. Stay tuned for more updates as I advance further in my cloud expertise!
Shubham Murti — Aspiring Cloud Security Engineer | Weekly Cloud Learning !!
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