Amazon Web Services (AWS) LLC, an Amazon.com company, has announced a limited public beta of its new Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service, a secure and seamless bridge between a company's existing IT infrastructure and the AWS cloud. The service helps enterprises overcome a major obstacle to adoption of the cloud.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), an
Amazon.com company, has announced a limited public beta of its new
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service, a secure and
seamless bridge between a company's existing IT infrastructure and the
AWS cloud.
"This is a secure bridge between existing enterprise IT
infrastructure and the AWS cloud, Adam Selipsky, Amazon Web Services'
vice president of product management and developer relations told eWEEK
in an interview at AWS offices here. "This allows enterprises to bring
over IP addressing and bring over VPN and familiar infrastructure to
include the cloud," he said.
Indeed, Amazon VPC enables enterprises to connect their existing
infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual
Private Network (VPN) connection, and to extend their existing
management capabilities such as security services, firewalls, and
intrusion detection systems to include their AWS resources, the company
said. And Amazon VPC integrates today with Amazon EC2 compute
resources, and will integrate with other AWS services in the future,
Selipsky said.
Amazon announced the release of Amazon VPC on Aug. 26, along with supporting press material and
blog posts.
"One of the most significant barriers to adoption of the cloud has
been the need to both maintain existing infrastructure and separately
run resources in the cloud," Selipsky said. Amazon's new VPC eliminates
this barrier. "Enterprises don't want to have to open up a second front
to their internal infrastructure, so Amazon VPC is built to solve that
problem. Customers will have all the benefits of their own IT
infrastructure along with all the benefits of the cloud, including
flexibility, elasticity, reliability, security, etc."
As with all Amazon Web Services, there are no long-term contracts,
minimum spend or up-front investments required. With Amazon VPC,
you pay only for the resources you use. To get started using
Amazon VPC, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
"Pricing is very simple and familiar," Selipsky said. "Like other
AWS services, it's pay-as-you-go -- five cents per hour per VPN
connection."
"For the last three years, AWS has provided companies of all sizes
with on-demand, highly elastic and highly reliable technology resources
in the cloud," said Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web
Services, in a statement. "As more and more enterprises leverage the
cloud, they want a simple, seamless way to migrate their large and
complex IT infrastructures to AWS, and to use the security and
management controls that their IT teams already know. We built Amazon
VPC for this purpose-to allow any company to seamlessly connect their
existing resources to the AWS cloud as if it were a part of their own
datacenter."
With Amazon VPC, AWS customers can create an isolated set of AWS
resources that they then access via an industry-standard encrypted
IPSec VPN connection, Amazon officials said. Using a few simple API
calls, users create their isolated network, specify the IP address
range of their own choosing, and then launch Amazon EC2 instances into
that network, Selipsky said. Next, users create a secure VPN to bridge
those AWS resources to their existing IT infrastructure. Cloud traffic
bound for the Internet routes over the VPN where it is examined by the
customer's existing security and networking technologies before heading
to the public Internet, Amazon said. With Amazon VPC, customers can
access their resources running in the AWS cloud as if these assets were
running within their existing IT infrastructure, the company said.
Selipsky said initially Amazon VPC will run as a limited public beta
-- which follows a private beta that has been in effect for several
months now -- but the number of organizations allowed to participate
will grow over time. And initially each company will have one VPC,
whereas in the future they can have multiple VPCs. However, each
company participating in the beta will be able to have 20 subnets under
their VPC, Selipsky said.
"The service is fully functional, fully secure and ready to run real
and meaningful workloads from day one," Selipsky said. "It's ready for
production use."
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