Virtual Private Cloud

Similar to other services, Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) has seen quite a few functionalities added to it over the past years; a few important ones are highlighted here:

• Support for IPv6: With the exponential growth of the IT industry as well as the internet, it was only a matter of time before VPC too started support for IPv6. Today, IPv6 is extended and available across all AWS regions. It even works with services such as EC2 and S3. Enabling IPv6 for your applications and instances is an extremely easy process. All you need to do is enable the IPv6 CIDR block option, as depicted in the VPC creation wizard:

Each IPv6 enabled VPC comes with its own /56 address prefix, whereas the individual subnets created in this VPC support a /64 CIDR block.

• DNS resolution for VPC Peering: With DNS resolution enabled for your VPC peering, you can now resolve public DNS hostnames to private IP addresses when queried from any of your peered VPCs. This actually simplifies the DNS setup for your VPCs and enables the seamless extension of your network environments to the cloud.
• VPC endpoints for DynamoDB: Yet another amazing feature to be provided for VPCs later this year is the support for endpoints for your DynamoDB tables. Why is this so important all of a sudden? Well, for starters, you don't require internet gateways or NAT instances attached to your VPCs if you are leveraging the endpoints for DynamoDB. This essentially saves costs and makes the traffic between your application to the DB stay local to the AWS internal network, unlike previously where the traffic from your app would have to bypass the internet in order to reach your DynamoDB instance. Secondly, endpoints for DynamoDB virtually eliminate the need for maintaining complex firewall rules to secure your VPC. And thirdly, and most importantly, it's free!