A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a public cloud service that allows organisations to run a private cloud infrastructure within a public cloud. AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure and other service providers such as Stream Networks offer their own VPC infrastructure.
How is a Virtual Private Cloud Isolated from other customers?
With a Virtual Private Cloud, customer cloud computing infrastructure is isolated from other customers within the public cloud by defining network security, access controls, security groups, private VLAN’s and private IP address subnets that can only be used by the VPC.
In other words a VPC is a logical grouping of resources in a cloud provider’s shared public cloud network that can be provisioned by a tenant with a very high degree of visibility and control. A VPC is a cloud provider’s offering that gives you a private, secure network that is logically isolated from your public cloud counterparts. A VPC gives you a high degree of control over your computing resources, ensuring that they are accessible only by you and your delegated team members. In other words, a VPC is a cloud provider’s offering that lets you provision your own private cloud on a shared public cloud.
What’s the difference between a Private Cloud and a VPC?
A private cloud is a on-premises cloud platform hosted in a data center that is entirely dedicated to a single customer. It will normally consist of dedicated servers, dedicated SAN’s, switch infrastructure, firewalls, and a dedicated hypervisor such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, or an open source hypervisor such as KVM. A private cloud is dedicated wholly to the customer and not shared with anyone else.
A Virtual Private Cloud will share the underlying infrastructure/cloud resources (the hosts, switches, firewalls, and block storage) with other customers but will be segmented by security groups and access controls so the cloud and web applications cannot be accessed by anyone else.
What are the benefits of a Virtual Private Cloud compared to a private cloud
There are a number of features to a Virtual Private cloud from scalability, pricing, security and API’s.
Scalability
With a Virtual Private Cloud you are no longer limited by physical or endpoint infrastructure as your VPC runs in a public cloud. This provides the ability to scale your compute workloads more effectively for dealing with an increase in compute requirements for critical applications such as SQL server or if your business has seasonal changes. A VPC delivers access to greater resources whether it’s computing resources, bandwidth over the public internet or VPN traffic you can easily scale your business compute infrastructure in real-time.
Pricing
With a VPC you no longer have to worry about capital expenditure on expensive hardware or on-going maintenance costs, a VPC provides cost-effective monthly pricing with options to upgrade or downgrade infrastructure month by month.
Security
With a VPC you no longer have to install dedicated hardware firewall appliances you can virtualize a firewall from the leading supported Vendors. A VPC provider should also deliver DDOS protected public internet access protecting your IP address ranges from denial of service attacks.
Accessing your VPC securely is delivered by a VPN (Virtual Private Network) providing secure encrypted authentication to your cloud environment, in addition public cloud providers such as Amazon VPC (Amazon Virtual Private Cloud) offer private connectivity to your infrastructure although data transfer over a private connection can be charged.
Availability
Ensuring your compute environment has a 99.9%+ uptime can get expensive when deploying a private cloud. With a VPC the public cloud provider has completed all the investment for you so you can reduce downtime by leveraging their capacity, from dynamic BGP route tables, resilient internet links, DNS services and built in load balancing for highly resilient network traffic.
API’s
Public Clouds provide a range of SDK (Software Development Kits), API’s and devops for advanced integration, microservices, and machine learning enabling you to develop apps, network automation and interact with your data and SaaS applications with ease
Virtual Private Cloud Overview
Choosing the right cloud solution for your business can be an important decision. Whether you are deploying Virtual Desktops, looking at private, virtual private cloud or hybrid cloud ensuring you have the right infrastructure that is secure and can scale with your business needs is key to a successful outcome.
Stream Networks are experts in multi-cloud deployments from delivering private cloud infrastructure in highly secure datacenters to our own Virtual Private Cloud platform based on VMware, we can help you on your digital transformation journey to a cloud enabled infrastructure.
If you would like further help or information with your journey in the cloud, please contact us using the contact form below, or by email to sales@stream-networks.co.uk or by phone on 01635884170.