Designing large-scale AWS networks

Explore regional view of AWS network design, showing how each region uses a transit gateway and transit VPC, connects via encrypted peering, and supports internet, VPC-to-VPC, and on-prem connectivity.

Transit gateways act as high-performance hub routers that connect VPCs, VPNs, Direct Connect, and more via attachments, with route tables and propagation guiding traffic.

set up a transit gateway design with a default transit vpc route table for propagation and a spoke vpc route table with static route to transit vpc attachment appliance mode.

Understand gateway load balancers and how they route traffic to stateful security appliances via VPC endpoints, privatelink, and geneve encapsulation (udp 6081).

Explore the transit VPC components, including a three-AZ replicated design and an inspection VPC with a gateway load balancer. Understand transit gateway attachments, auto scaling groups, and Palo Alto firewalls.

Discover spoke VPC components for a resilient, scalable network, including public, private, and firewall subnets, AZ ID considerations, gateway load balancer endpoints, NAT gateways, and route tables.

Learn how inbound and outbound internet traffic is routed in a large-scale aws network design, using vpc endpoints, gateway load balancers, nat gateways, firewalls, and route tables.

Explore how vpc-to-vpc traffic is routed through transit gateways, firewalls, and vpc endpoints, with route tables guiding traffic between spoke and transit vpcs and across regions.

Explore AWS Direct Connect, a private, high-bandwidth, low-latency link connecting your data center to AWS resources like VPC and S3, via private, public, or transit interfaces and BGP neighborship.

Explore on-prem connectivity options to AWS, including virtual network appliances, virtual private gateways, transit gateways, and Direct Connect. Apply design considerations for reliable, scalable IPsec tunnels and multi-path connectivity.

Explore on-prem connectivity for AWS. Choose direct connect gateways with a transit gateway for performance, or network services VPC with VPNs over dedicated or internet paths to extend route advertisements.

Assess the design's firewall-focused setup, where security policies govern traffic, with up to 100 gbps internet and 50 gbps vpc-to-vpc, and plan costs with downloadable estimates for automated multi-az deployments.

Expand your understanding of large-scale AWS networks by exploring DNS design options, auto scaling policies, Palo Alto VM series plugin, bootstrap processes, licensing, Panorama association, and automated bootstrap challenges.

Explore AWS DNS design options for VPCs, including resolvers, private DNS, and Route 53 private hosted zones. Implement resilient, cost-aware DNS using resolver endpoints and conditional forwarding.

Explain autoscaling groups and how they scale out or in based on CPU utilization thresholds such as 40%, tracking policies with CloudWatch metrics and warmup timers to maintain 1–3 firewalls.

Explore the Palo Alto VM-Series plugin and its gateway load balancer integration for AWS, and learn management interface swap with bootstrap commands to associate VPC endpoints and verify deployment.

Discover the firewalls bootstrap process in a large-scale AWS design: a lambda-driven workflow attaches data interfaces, registers with the gateway load balancer, and applies the bootstrap package from S3.

Explore Palo Alto firewalls in AWS, including pay-as-you-go and bring-your-own-license AMIs, cost implications, AWS marketplace subscriptions, obtaining AMI IDs, and bootstrap licensing for transit VPC Terraform deployments.

Learn to associate transit VPC firewalls with a Panorama server using bootstrap configuration and an authentication key, updating the transit VPC module to support init-cfg automation.

Explore the section four transit VPC deployment package, deploy an example network, provision a spoke, and cover optional features such as direct connect, licensing, panorama configurations, and transit gateway peering.

Explore the transit VPC module structure and deployment workflow, from Terraform scripts and bootstrap XMLs to Lambda functions, with emphasis on editing variables.tf and related Python files for deployment.

Deploy a transit VPC network in AWS by following the guide to allocate IPs with a supernet, assign a unique BGP ASN, and configure firewalls across three AZs using Terraform.

Deploy a Direct Connect gateway with a Transit Gateway association using Terraform, uncomment and configure BGP and IP settings, and deploy the VPC while preparing on-prem connectivity.

Bootstrap licensing configurations for transit VPC firewalls using Palo Alto auto bundles. Set the auth code bundle in variables.tf and uncomment blocks in main.tf, then run Terraform.

Bootstrapping Panorama configurations for transit VPC firewalls by setting bootstrap variables, generating an auth key via SSH, and updating Terraform with the Panorama server IP and device group templates.

Explore the spoke VPC module, its Terraform and Python deployment scripts, and the end-to-end deployment process for a spoke VPC with transit VPC firewalls and VPC endpoints.

Deploy a spoke VPC using the spoke VPC module, building on the transit VPC with gateway load balancer integration, Terraform variables, and a Python script to push firewall configs.

Understand how the transit gateway peering module enables encrypted connections between regional transit gateways. Use Terraform initiator and acceptor modules with summary routes to configure spoke VPC routing.

Explore network test instances in the spoke VPC module, three EC2s in public subnets across three AZs, for troubleshooting, bashing host, and monitoring.

Learn to generate Palo Alto API keys for automation by creating a firewall admin account with permissions and using curl or a browser to obtain and securely store the key.

Back up transit VPC firewall by downloading its running configuration XML via a firewall API call and save it to the projects directory; API key, Python 3, and requests needed.

Synchronize running configurations of transit VPC firewalls with a Python script using requests and boto3, updating hostnames and pushing XML configurations while refreshing bootstrap buckets across ASGs.