Amazon VPC

Amazon VPC

My next post was going to start defining the security referee concept I came up with previously but something much more interesting happened today: Amazon Web Services announced their newest addition, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) which adds a new dimension to Amazon’s cloud service offerings. Based on the information available, Amazon VPC works much the same way existing Amazon EC2 instances work with the very important exception that access to your EC2 instances are isolated within Amazons web services cloud network. To access your VPC instances you create an IPSec VPN tunnel between your organization and Amazon. Once set up EC2-VPC instances behave exactly like a local system on your network would, with whatever IP address you want to give it (including RFC 1918 addresses but not IPv6 addresses).

At first glance Amazon VPC is a significant new offering as it places you in direct control over the traffic entering and leaving  your EC2-VPC  instances (aside from the obvious that you are still trusting Amazon to configure and maintain things correctly on their end) and opens the door to enabling in the cloud hosting of all sorts of applications that previously you would only consider hosting internally. But is Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud really private? (more…)