AWS Networking Design - In Depth

Master core design principles for cloud networks, including hierarchy, modularity, high availability, scalability, simplicity, and security, and learn how modular, layered VPC architectures reduce single points of failure.

Compare bottom-up and top-down design approaches for AWS networking, highlighting how business and application requirements, constraints, and feasibility shape practical, cost-aware architecture decisions.

Explore functional vs non-functional requirements, with examples on encryption, redundancy, and synchronous cross-region replication to distinguish system behavior from architectural qualities.

Evaluate cloud design principles by balancing capex and opex, proving value through operational performance, and prioritizing simplicity to reduce operational costs, while building today for tomorrow and scalability.

AWS global infrastructure unifies regions and availability zones with a private 100 gig fiber network to deliver low latency, high throughput, and global reach, including edge locations and CloudFront.

Explore IP addressing in an AWS VPC across multiple availability zones, covering CIDR blocks, private RFC 1918 ranges, IPv6 dual stack, subnets, DHCP options, and elastic IP concepts.

Learn how VPC routing uses the main route table and custom route tables to control traffic between subnets, leveraging internet gateway, nat gateway, and private and public subnet designs.

Explore how VPC route tables differ from classical router route tables, highlighting destination-based routing and how subnet associations enable source-based routing via internet gateway and NAT gateway.

Design a simple, effective route-table strategy by mapping traffic flows and security requirements before configuring multiple route tables, subnets, and potential firewall paths in a VPC.

Learn how a VPC route table prioritizes routes: local CIDR first, then longest prefix match, then static versus propagated routes, with prefix lists shaping static routes.

Explore how to use more specific routes in VPC route tables to achieve traffic engineering, routing through a firewall or NAT gateway, and symmetrical routing across subnets and availability zones.

Review vpc network acls as subnet-level, stateless filters, and security groups as instance-level, stateful filters with cross-group references. Learn scalable rule design, including blacklisting versus whitelisting and vpc references.

Assess how physical proximity, MTU, and instance size affect VPC network performance. Use enhanced networking and placement groups to increase per-flow bandwidth up to 10 gbps.

Understand data transfer cost considerations in AWS networking design, including free VPC traffic, charged data out, CloudFront caching savings, and NAT Gateway processing and cross-zone effects.

Explore connecting a VPC to the internet using public subnets, Internet gateways, and virtual firewall appliances, with ingress routing and Gateway Load Balancer for scalable, multi-AZ protection.

Explore gateway load balancer architectures in a VPC, using endpoints and private link to steer traffic to firewall or IPS appliances, with AZ-specific ENIs and route tables.

Explore outbound internet access from a private subnet using NAT gateways in a public subnet, with multi-AZ high availability and gateway load balancer and network firewall inspection.

Design service chaining in an AWS VPC by inserting firewall inspection, NAT, and optional security services along the traffic path, using specific routes and subnets to ensure symmetric inspection.

Learn how to privately connect your VPC to AWS services using gateway endpoints for S3 and DynamoDB, alongside interface endpoints, and configure route tables and DNS with regional peering constraints.

Learn to connect to AWS services privately from a VPC using interface endpoints powered by PrivateLink, with private DNS, and compare to gateway endpoints.

Enhance resiliency, scalability, and security by introducing elastic load balancers (ELB) to distribute traffic across healthy app nodes with health checks and SSL offloading.

Learn how elastic load balancing uses target groups and listeners, Route 53 DNS routing, health checks, and autoscaling to distribute requests among healthy, stateless instances across multiple availability zones.

Define an ELB design with a listener, target group, health checks, and optional auto scaling, while securing traffic with security groups and ensuring inbound and return traffic to the ELB.

Explore design patterns for API gateway, ELB, and NLB use cases, including Lambda backends, request validation, and private connectivity via PrivateLink and VPC endpoints.

Explore how to combine auto scaling policies, balance minimum and maximum capacity, and use target tracking or step policies with CloudWatch alarms to adjust desired capacity.

Learn how multiple auto scaling policies co-exist in AWS, including target tracking with SQS messages and step scaling by CPU utilization, and test for stability before production.

Configure scheduled and predictive auto scaling for EC2 with load balancers, using AWS observations and machine learning models to forecast the next 48 hours and scale proactively for weekly peaks.

Design autoscaling with target tracking policies as default, using average cpu requests per target from the load balancer, and ensure resilience across availability zones by aligning with business requirements.

Explore the AWS network load balancer (NLB), a layer 4 service delivering ultra-low latency for TCP, UDP, and TLS with static IPs per availability zone and optional SSL offload.

Assess business requirements and application behavior to decide when to use the network load balancer. Use nl b for static ip in a vpc, high scale, and layer-4 non-http connections.

Discover how an application load balancer operates at the application layer, routing by url path and host to target groups and lambda targets, with https termination and waf integration.

Explore security filtering in AWS networking by comparing ALB and NLB behavior, illustrating security group references, health checks, and ACL considerations for scalable, secure designs.

Demonstrate an elastic ELB migration design using application load balancer, global accelerator, and AWS WAF to enable static IPs, HTTP header inspection, SSL offloading, and canary deployments with Lambda.

Design a global, multi-region resiliency solution using application load balancers in each region, complemented by Route 53 DNS and optionally CloudFront CDN for scale.

Explore how Amazon Route 53 provides a highly available DNS layer for global traffic, health checks, and diverse routing policies.

Explore Route 53 DNS request policies, including simple routing and multivalue answers, and learn alias records, health checks, and design scenarios for resilient, multi-region solutions across VPCs.

Master Route 53 failover and weighted routing to route traffic between primary and secondary resources based on health checks, and apply geolocation routing with EDNS subnet for location-based latency.

Explore geo proximity routing in Route 53, using bias to expand or shrink traffic to geographic regions, and compare with latency based routing across multiple regions for lowest latency.

Combine geolocation and failover routing in Route 53 to direct Europe users to the Frankfurt region and automatically fail over to the US when health checks fail.

Discuss latency based routing with weighted routing in Route 53 across two regions, routing to healthy EC2 instances via health checks for resiliency aligned with business needs.

Explore how the content delivery network, especially CloudFront, fits the AWS global infrastructure to deliver low-latency, high-bandwidth content, focusing on performance, security, and cost optimization.

Explore how content delivery networks like CloudFront boost performance by delivering content from the nearest edge location, reducing latency and bandwidth through intelligent routing, DNS, and edge caching.

Explore how regional edge caches and CloudFront edge locations reduce origin load by serving content from cached layers, with origin shield boosting cache hits, failover, and scalable performance.

Explore how CloudFront accelerates dynamic content using SSL/TLS optimization, persistent connections, and Lambda at the edge, while configuring multiple origins and cache behaviors for efficient delivery.

Explore DDoS defense with CloudFront, Route 53, and AWS Shield Standard at the edge. Learn to protect DNS, apply WAF for layer attacks, and leverage global infrastructure for rapid mitigation.

Explore a multi-layered DDoS mitigation strategy using AWS CloudFront and Route 53, from internet and border network defenses to application layer protections with WAF.

Learn how AWS CloudFront access control uses signed URLs and cookies, geo restriction, and origin access identity to securely serve private content through edge locations.

Explore encryption in transit with CloudFront, detailing TLS negotiations between the viewer, CloudFront, and the origin, plus encryption at rest on edge and regional locations.

Implement DDoS mitigation by reducing attack surface with cdn and elastic load balancing, plan for scale with redundant internet connections and baselining alongside multilayer security firewalls.

Explore the building blocks of AWS hybrid connectivity, including the AWS network service endpoint, network connection options, and customer gateway device, and examine design scenarios for on-prem and multi-VPC architectures.

Learn how the virtual private gateway (VGW) acts as a regional VPC gateway that terminates VPN and Direct Connect connections and guides route selection with BGP and static routes.

Explore the direct connect gateway, a globally accessible logical object that connects direct connect to up to ten vpcs across regions, with vpg or transit gateway associations and bgp routing.

Learn how AWS transit gateway creates hub and spoke connectivity to multiple VPCs and on-prem networks via VPN or Direct Connect, using attachments, route tables, and propagation for scalable routing.

explore the transit gateway architecture, including shared services VPCs, multi-account designs, subnet attachments, and per-flow equal-cost path routing, with emphasis on AZ attachments and route prioritization.

Define site-to-site VPN and hybrid connectivity, showing secure links between VPCs and on-premises sites over internet or MPLS, and compare managed vs customer-managed VPN using gateway options.

Explore AWS site-to-site VPN design with a virtual private gateway and two IPsec tunnels, using BGP or static routing with on-premises customer gateway and optional digital certificates for IKE authentication.

Explore BGP route selection using as-path, prepending, and multi-exit discriminator. Visualize hub-and-spoke VPN cloud hub designs connecting sites, VPCs, and Direct Connect.

Learn how AWS Transit Gateway provides a highly available managed VPN with dynamic routing and BGP, uses ECMP for higher throughput, and supports accelerated VPN via AWS Global Accelerator.

Compare VPN cloud hub and transit gateway to choose between a low-cost hub-and-spoke VPN for multiple sites and scalable, high-throughput routing with transit gateway across many VPCs.

Examine customer managed VPN options, including EC2-based software and SD-WAN appliances, and compare Transit VPC and Transit Gateway designs for scalable, encrypted IPsec connectivity with BGP routing.

Distinguish overlay from transport, then select the appropriate transport network (Direct Connect or internet). Design a scalable, secure, integrated sd-wan that fits AWS Transit Gateway and hybrid connectivity.

Assess when to use customer-managed VPN and SD-WAN for hybrid connectivity, considering investment protection, encryption over AWS Direct Connect, and routing options like Transit Gateway and application based routing.