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An illustrated guide to Amazon VPCs

35 points by egonschiele 1y ago

davesmylie 1y ago
I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers. I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm
- pugz 1y ago
  If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964
- pram 1y ago
  It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.
- bspammer 1y ago
  I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?
- cmckn 1y ago
  My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!
  - spwa4 1y ago
    That's crazy. That would never work unless these are just a VLAN configured on existing switches. Even VXLAN wouldn't be able to do that 5 years ago.
    - UltraSane 1y ago
      AWS developed their own custom overlay networking system. It embeds tenant IDs into the packets for isolation
    - DevelopingElk 1y ago
      Running out of IP addresses within that VPC is a real difficulty for services still using it.
MehdiHK 1y ago
Not related to VPC, but I'm a big fan of the author. Loved his book "Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People" when it came out a few years ago. If you know anyone struggling with common data structures and algorithms, this book can make it fun for them.
- egonschiele 1y ago
  Thank you, I'm glad you liked the book!! That was a fun project, and I learned a lot while writing it.
v5o 1y ago
[dead]
egonschiele 1y ago
Hey everyone, I'm the author. Let me know if you have any questions!
- sceadu 1y ago
  are you planning on turning this into a book also? if so I'd be interested. the blog posts were very helpful :)
  - egonschiele 1y ago
    I've been thinking about it! Maybe a book that covers the basics of putting an app up on AWS... networking, covering the different options such as EC2, ECS, and fargate, plus a bit about load balancers and IAM.

35 points by egonschiele 1y ago

I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers. I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm

pugz 1y ago
If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964
pram 1y ago
It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.
bspammer 1y ago
I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?
cmckn 1y ago
My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!
- spwa4 1y ago
  That's crazy. That would never work unless these are just a VLAN configured on existing switches. Even VXLAN wouldn't be able to do that 5 years ago.
  - UltraSane 1y ago
    AWS developed their own custom overlay networking system. It embeds tenant IDs into the packets for isolation
  - DevelopingElk 1y ago
    Running out of IP addresses within that VPC is a real difficulty for services still using it.

MehdiHK 1y ago

Not related to VPC, but I'm a big fan of the author. Loved his book "Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People" when it came out a few years ago. If you know anyone struggling with common data structures and algorithms, this book can make it fun for them.

egonschiele 1y ago
Thank you, I'm glad you liked the book!! That was a fun project, and I learned a lot while writing it.

v5o 1y ago

[dead]

egonschiele 1y ago

Hey everyone, I'm the author. Let me know if you have any questions!

sceadu 1y ago
are you planning on turning this into a book also? if so I'd be interested. the blog posts were very helpful :)
- egonschiele 1y ago
  I've been thinking about it! Maybe a book that covers the basics of putting an app up on AWS... networking, covering the different options such as EC2, ECS, and fargate, plus a bit about load balancers and IAM.