A virtual private cloud (VPC) is an on-demand configurable pool of shared resources allocated within a public

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

environment, providing a certain level of isolation between the different organizations (denoted as ''users'' hereafter) using the resources. The isolation between one VPC user and all other users of the same cloud (other VPC users as well as other public cloud users) is achieved normally through allocation of a private IP subnet and a virtual communication construct (such as a

VLAN A virtual local area network (VLAN) is any broadcast domain that is partitioned and isolated in a computer network at the data link layer ( OSI layer 2).IEEE 802.1Q-2011, ''1.4 VLAN aims and benefits'' In this context, virtual, refers to a ph ...

or a set of

encrypted communication Secure communication is when two entities are communicating and do not want a third party to listen in. For this to be the case, the entities need to communicate in a way that is unsusceptible to eavesdropping or interception. Secure communication ...

channels) per user. In a VPC, the previously described mechanism, providing isolation within the cloud, is accompanied with a virtual private network (VPN) function (again, allocated per VPC user) that secures, by means of authentication and encryption, the remote access of the organization to its VPC resources. With the introduction of the described isolation levels, an organization using this service is in effect working on a 'virtually private' cloud (that is, as if the cloud infrastructure is not shared with other users), and hence the name VPC. VPC is most commonly used in the context of cloud

infrastructure as a service The first major provider of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was Amazon in 2008. IaaS is a cloud computing service model by means of which computing resources are supplied by a cloud services provider. The IaaS vendor provides the storage, net ...

. In this context, the infrastructure provider, providing the underlying public cloud infrastructure, and the provider realizing the VPC service over this infrastructure, may be different vendors.

Implementations

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide d ...

launched Amazon Virtual Private Cloud on 26 August 2009, which allows the

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a part of Amazon.com's cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), that allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 encourages scalable deployment o ...

service to be connected to legacy infrastructure over an

IPsec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...

VPN. In AWS, the basic VPC is free to use, with users being charged by usage for additional features. EC2 and RDS instances running in a VPC can also be purchased using Reserved Instances, however will have a limitation on resources being guaranteed.

IBM Cloud IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

launched IBM Cloud VPC on 4 June 2019, provides an ability to manage virtual machine-based compute, storage, and networking resources. Pricing for

Virtual Private Cloud is applied separately for internet data transfer, virtual server instances, and block storage used within IBM Cloud VPC. Google Cloud Platform resources can be provisioned, connected, and isolated in a virtual private cloud (VPC) across all GCP regions. With GCP, VPCs are global resources and subnets within that VPC are regional resources. This allows users to connect zones and regions without the use of additional networking complexity as all data travels, encrypted in transit and at rest, on Google's own global, private network. Identity management policies and security rules allow for private access to Google's storage, big data, and analytics managed services. VPCs on Google Cloud Platform leverage the security of Google's data centers. Microsoft Azure offers the possibility of setting up a VPC using Virtual Networks.

References

{{Cloud computing Cloud computing

Implementations

See also

References