Hi, I'm Ryan Sumner and I'm a Chief Network Architect with IBM Cloud. Do you know what VPC means and why it even matters to you in your public cloud journey? Well, today I'm going to break it down.
VPC, or Virtual Private Cloud, is a public cloud capability that provides you the ability to define and then control isolated virtual networks and then deploy cloud resources into those networks. So what's a virtual network? Well, to help you understand that, let me first help you understand how we would deploy networks in a standard public cloud.
An administrator is going to define a backbone. That backbone is going to carry all the traffic in that cloud. There's going to be some segmentation on that backbone to create a separation between one client and another client, or let's even say separation between one application and another application within the same client. So now that we have that segmentation, we need a network function to actually allow us to have communication between those segments.
A network function we're going to call router. So now that we have communication between these segments, I might choose to say I don't want traffic to flow between this segment and that segment. Let's say because this is customer A and this is customer B.
So now I have a firewall function that provides us with filtering capability. So now I have my cloud defined, it's completely isolated, it's not connected to the rest of the world, but I need internet connectivity because I'm hosting a web application here. Now I need a network function that's going to provide me with NATing.
In addition, I need to extend my enterprise, or I have applications here that need to communicate and get data from my enterprise on site. Go. I'm going to build a VPN function. So in a traditional cloud environment, almost all these network functions are actually done with appliances.
They're done with appliances that require infrastructure administrators or network administrators to log into them using proprietary interface to define all these flows and controls. If you look at virtual networking, however, we introduce all of these capabilities as a service. We introduce all these capabilities to the user to where they can now create these functions and create this isolation and this segmentation with a UI or a CLI or an API. So they might be able to say, I want four of these networks, and I want to define my own custom segmentation for this application or that application. Now I want to have connectivity to my enterprise, I provision a VPN service to get connectivity to the internet.
Instead of having to configure NATing, I provide, I provision a service to be able to give me that ability. So now, the user has this control, and they didn't need to know any proprietary interfaces to make these connections or define these flows. And since each of these are networks, they're completely isolated with each other. They don't have connectivity between each network until I say so.
So now let's talk about a few of the benefits, right? Now you understand where the virtual network comes into play and how that actually contributes to the private piece of VPC. So some of the benefits are because now I can get all these functions and I have isolation built in.
I have some security aspects. In addition, since these aren't appliances and it's actually provided as a capability of the cloud, I can do all of this. Again, developers need things that are customizable, right? So the aspect of being able to define the segmentation and say I want four or five or six or tear it all down and come back tomorrow and do it again, I need some aspects of customizing this environment.
In addition, it's flexible enough. to allow the user to be able to say, I need to be able to add virtual segmentation later on down the road, or I need connectivity to the enterprise down the road. So all of these two attributes here actually allow the developers to become more agile, which hopefully is going to save you some money.
So now you understand virtual private cloud and why it matters to you. We hope you liked this video on VPC. If you did or you have any questions, please comment below and don't forget to like and subscribe.