Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

This morning from Pat:

AWS now lets you connect your cloud instances to your own physical network over a VPN.

From: Amazon Web Services
Subject: Introducing Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

Dear Amazon EC2 Customer,

We are excited to announce the limited beta of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between your existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables you to connect your existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend your existing management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems to include your AWS resources. Amazon VPC integrates today with Amazon EC2 compute resources, and we will integrate Amazon VPC with other AWS services in the future.

Here are some service highlights:

* Isolated Network Access - Amazon VPC provides end-to-end network isolation by utilizing an IP address range you specify, and by routing all network traffic between your VPC and datacenter through an industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN. This allows you to leverage your pre-existing security infrastructure, such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems to inspect network traffic going to and from a VPC.

* Flexible - You control your VPC in much the same way you control your datacenter, using familiar network concepts such as subnets and gateways. With Amazon VPC, you can 1) freely create subnets to organize your resources based on the criteria you define, 2) assign an IP address range for Amazon EC2 instances within subnets, and 3) configure secure connectivity to determine who can access your AWS cloud-based resources.

* Best of Both Worlds - Amazon VPC enables you to build a bridge between your existing IT resources and your isolated resources within the AWS cloud, enabling you to use both worlds in concert. Now, you can build hybrid architectures that allow you to take full advantage of the benefits of the AWS cloud - true elasticity without owning the capital expense of the hardware or datacenter (given AWS's pay-as-you-go pricing) - and yet still have the network isolation and secure connectivity you would enjoy if all the resources were in your own datacenter. With Amazon VPC, you can gradually move to the AWS cloud, replicate your entire data center, or anywhere in between.

* Reliable - Amazon VPC is built using Amazon's own world-class technology infrastructure. Like other Amazon Web Services, the service runs within Amazon's proven global network infrastructure and datacenters.

Amazon VPC is available on a pay-as-you-go basis with no up-front fee, minimum spend or long-term commitment required. Please see the Amazon VPC product page: http://aws.amazon.com/vpc for more information on this exciting new service, and for details on how to request access to the limited beta. We will admit participants over time, but wanted to let you know about it now, seeing that this has been a much-requested AWS capability.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team