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Cloud Reportby Jeffrey Schwartz, Executive Editor
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Amazon Eases Virtual Private Cloud Access
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week has begun enabling customers to target its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) service directly via the Internet.
Until now, customers using Amazon's EC2 cloud service could provision a separate section of the Amazon cloud called Amazon VPC via a virtual private network (VPN) connection to an existing customer's datacenter.
Amazon said this should be a welcome development for those who don't want to use VPN connections to link their datacenters to a VPC.
"While I would hate to be innocently accused of hyperbole, I do think that today's release legitimately qualifies as massive, one that may very well change the way that you think about EC2 and how it can be put to use in your environment," said AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.
"You can now create a network topology in the AWS cloud that closely resembles the one in your physical data center including public, private and DMZ subnets," he added. "Instead of dealing with cables, routers and switches, you can design and instantiate your network programmatically. You can use the AWS Management Console (including a slick new wizard), the command line tools, or the APIs. This means that you could store your entire network layout in abstract form, and then realize it on demand."
Amazon said it is not charging extra to deploy a VPC, Barr noted, nor for creating a subnet, network access control lists, security groups, routing tables or VPNs. Nor is there an extra charge for traffic between S3 and EC2 instances in the VPC.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on March 16, 2011