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Everything You Need To Know About Networking On AWS

Graham Lyons on January 28, 2018

Everything You Need To Know About Networking On AWS Disclaimer: I'm not a network engineer and never have been - a tame network engineer...
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dmitrykankalovich profile image
Dmitry Kankalovich

Great post, Graham!

I just would like to point out some small things for improvement:

  • The VPC CIDR max block is /16, therefore in Internet Gateways section the local route 10.0.0.0/8 should really be /16
  • It might be a bit more advanced topic, however I'd also mention NACLs at least, and also probably VPC peering and VPC endpoints
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imthedeveloper profile image
ImTheDeveloper • Edited

Thanks for this post. Definitely an area I need to greatly improve my understanding. Networking in general has never been something I've found any love for but definitely an area I need to read up on.

I'm interested in the NAT concept. I've read up briefly on this but it never really sticks in my mind. I believe the purpose is to only allow connections out of the network so that you can carry out tasks like running updates on your server is that correct? If the NAT has to establish the outbound connection, does this mean for example a webserver, running behind a NAT could not be addressed in the browser and receive a page back? If I wanted to do such a thing I just use a general purpose routing table and internet gateway in AWS?

Also another question, have you come across bastion hosts being used in AWS? Typically these are sat out on the edge allowing only white listed connections maybe over SSH to then enable you to SSH into your other boxes. I'd be interested to see such a set up explained too. I've used one at work, but never understood the exact connection setup.

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Graham Lyons

Network address translation is very common in private networks, for example the router in most homes performs NAT so that you can use the Internet.

does this mean for example a webserver, running behind a NAT could not be addressed
That's exactly right. In the same way that clients outside your home network can't access port 80 on your iPad (or whatever).

SSH bastions are a common set up and they work roughly the other way round to NAT boxes in that they sit in the public subnets and allow incoming traffic via SSH and then allow access to the rest of the VPC from themselves.

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Maqbool

Great post I was trying to understand this for hours this makes perfect sense :)