Features and Benefits of VPC Peering

VPC peering is a safe and fast way of establishing communication between the assets in your AWS accounts. In this post, we’ll discuss the features and benefits of VPC peering.

VPC stands for virtual private cloud. Before we start talking about VPC peering and its nitty gritty, let’s first understand what virtual private clouds are. 

What is a VPC?

A virtual public cloud is an isolated private cloud hosted within a public cloud. That means the owner of a VPC can store data, run code, host websites, and do anything they can do in an ordinary private cloud without having to set up the cloud data centers themselves. The VPC is like a reserved table in a crowded restaurant – while there are a lot of people using the same facility, some resources are reserved for a specific party and those are inaccessible to everyone else.

If you are an AWS customer, you can have VPCs hosted in AWS’s public cloud. Thus you can enjoy the security and exclusivity of a private cloud along with the massive scalability of public cloud.

What is VPC peering?

VPC peering is the process of establishing a connection between two VPCs associated with the same or different AWS accounts via private IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. VPC peering lets you route traffic between VPCs located in different regions without any additional physical hardware, a single point of failure, or bandwidth bottleneck.

How does a VPC peering connection work?

AWS uses the existing architecture of a VPC to build the VPC peering connection between two or more VPCs. It allows you to route traffic between EC2 instances and other assets located in AWS VPC in the same or different regions. The VPCs can belong to the same or different AS accounts, however, they cannot have identical CIDR blocks.

5 Things to keep in mind while setting up a VPC peering connection

• If a VPC peering connection is to be built between two VPCs, one is called the requester and the other is called the acceptor. The owner of the requester VPC asks the owner of the acceptor VPC to create a VPC peering connection.    
• If the owner of the acceptor VPC approves the request, the VPC peering connection is formed.
• The owners of each VPC must add the IP address range of the other VPC to their route tables. This permits traffic via their private IP addresses.
• The owners must update the security group rules to ensure unrestricted traffic between the instances located in the VPCs.
• Enable hostname resolution to ensure that the EC2 instances in either VPC do not use public DNS hostnames.

Also Read – What is UPnP and Why You Should Keep Away from It Even in 2023

What are the benefits of using VPC peering?

VPC peering allows you to build a file-sharing network across AWS accounts. Not only can you establish traffic between the VPCs you can also allow other VPCs to access the resources you have in your VPC. Remember, this doesn’t happen through a gateway, a VPN, or a network appliance. The connection is established using the internal architecture of the VPCs. Hence, it does not create or suffer from a bandwidth limitation. Some other benefits are

• You can establish relationships between EC2 instances located in different AWS accounts.
• The traffic enabled through VPC peering stays within a private IP space.
• The traffic relies on the global AWS backbone and never enters the public domain.
• The inter-region traffic is encrypted and there is no single point of failure.
• It is a simple and inexpensive way of sharing resources between regions and creating geographic redundancy.
• Your data is protected from common exploits and DDoS attacks.

More properties of VPC peering

1. A VPC peering connection helps you increase the data flow between the resources located in multiple AWS accounts. 

2. The inter-region VPC peering established by AWS ensures that you can share resources across regions without resorting to VPNs or gateways. 
3. You cannot establish a VPC peering connection if your IPv6 blocks are unique but the IPv4 blocks are overlapping.
4. VPC peering does not support unicast reverse path forwarding.
5. Private DNS hostnames cannot be resolved into private IP addresses.

Conclusion

VPC peering comes with a lot of possibilities along with some constraints. But overall the benefits heavily outweigh the restrictions. It gives AWS users a massive advantage over private cloud users. The security of private clouds with the scalability of public clouds is already a boon, add to that the ability to access and share resources securely across regions and you’ve got pure gold. VPC peering connections are secure from common attacks like DDoS that threaten public cloud users. It’s a real stepping stone to the future of networking.