Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Explained

What is Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) ?

Virtual Private Cloud is a private network segment made available to a single cloud consumer or corporates within a public cloud. Or In other words we can define virtual private cloud (VPC) is a secure, isolated private cloud hosted within a public cloud environment. VPC customers can run code, store data, host websites, and do anything else they could do in an ordinary private cloud, but the private cloud is hosted remotely by a public cloud provider. 

A VPC gives corporate the ability to define and control a virtual cloud network that is logically isolated from all other public cloud environment. But provides a better secure environment as compared to public cloud. To understand more VPC, just assume a public cloud as a crowed restaurant with full of people and virtual private cloud (VPC) as a reserved table for specific people. Similarly, a public cloud is full of customers accessing cloud resources but VPC reserves some cloud resources for a specific customer.

Difference Between Public & Private Cloud

Public Cloud

In public cloud computing a service provider makes resources available to the end users over the Internet. The public cloud provider owns, manages, and assumes all responsibility for the data centers, hardware, and infrastructure on which its customers’ workloads run, and it typically provides high-bandwidth network connectivity to ensure high performance and rapid access to applications and data. These resources might be accessible for free, or access might be sold according to subscription-based or pay-per-usage pricing models.

Private Cloud

Private cloud is a cloud environment in which a company creates its own cloud environment that only it can utilize as an internal enterprise resource. Private cloud is also known as an internal cloud or corporate cloud. A private cloud is typically hosted on-premises in the customer’s data center. Private cloud deliver a higher level of security and privacy through both company firewalls and internal hosting to ensure operations and sensitive data are not accessible to third-party providers.

Technologies that isolate VPC within public cloud

There are lots technologies that isolate VPC from rest of public cloud environment are.

• Virtual LAN (VLAN):VLAN is a way of partitioning a network. VLAN is virtual local area network, or a group of computing devices in the same broadcast domain. A broadcast domain is a network segment in which if a device broadcast a packet then all the devices in the same broadcast domain will receive it. The devices in the same broadcast domain will receive all the broadcast packet but it is limited to switches only as routers don’t forward out the broadcast packet. 
• Subnets: Subnet is a range of IP addresses. Subnet allows you to create multiple logical networks that exist within a single Class A, B, or C network that are reserved so that they’re not available to everyone within the network, basically dividing a part of the network for private use.
• VPN: VPN is a virtual private network that allows end users to create a tunnel over an untrusted network and connect remotely and securely back into the enterprise network. VPN traffic passes through publicly shared Internet infrastructure – routers, switches, hubs etc. – but the traffic is encrypted and not visible to anyone.

Benefits of using VPC instead of private cloud

1. Agility: VPC provides a control the size of your virtual network and deploy instances (cloud resources) whenever your business needs them. You can scale these resources dynamically and in real-time. Because a VPC is hosted by a public cloud provider, you can add more computing resources on demand.
2. Affordability: VPC is cost-effective. You’ll save money on hardware, labor, and other related cloud instances. VPC hosted within public cloud, so cloud provider will be responsible for all maintenance and upkeep for all physical servers and software.
3. Availability: A virtual private cloud (VPC) offers redundancy and fault-tolerant availability zone architectures to decrease downtime, mean your applications and workloads are highly available at every moment of time.
4. Security: Although a VPC is part of a public cloud, but VPC is a logically isolated public cloud environment, your data and applications won’t share space or mix with those of the cloud provider’s other customers. 

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