10 Best Practice Tips for architecting your Amazon VPC

According to me Amazon VPC is one of the most important feature introduced by AWS. We have been using AWS from 2008 and Amazon VPC from the day it was introduced and i strongly feel the customer adoption towards AWS cloud gained real momentum only after the introduction of VPC into the market. 

Amazon VPC comes with lots of advantages over the limitations faced in Amazon Classic cloud like: Static private IP address , Elastic Network Interfaces :  possible to bind multiple Elastic Network Interfaces to a single instance, Internal Elastic Load Balancers, Advanced Network Access Control ,Setup a secure bastion host , DHCP options , Predictable internal IP ranges , Moving NICs and internal IPs between instances, VPN connectivity, Heightened security etc. Each and everything is a interesting topic on its own and i will be discussing them in detail in future.

Today i am sharing some of our implementation experience on working with hundreds of Amazon VPC deployments as best practice tips for the AWS user community. You can apply some of the relevant ones in your existing VPC or use these points as part of your migration approach to Amazon VPC.

Please also look into 27 Best practices on AWS Security Groups to understand the relation with Amazon VPC. 

Practice 1) Get your Amazon VPC combination right: Select the right Amazon VPC architecture first.  You need to decide the right Amazon VPC & VPN setup combination based on your current and future requirements. It is tough to modify/re-design the Amazon VPC at later stage, so it is better to design it taking into consideration your NW and expansion needs for next ~2 years. Currently different types of Amazon VPC setups are available; Like Public facing VPC, Public and Private setup VPC, Amazon VPC with Public and Private Subnets and Hardware VPN Access, Amazon VPC with Private Subnets and Hardware VPN Access, Software based VPN access etc. Choose the one which you feel you will be in next 1-2 years.

Practice 2) Choose your CIDR Blocks: While designing your Amazon VPC, the CIDR block should be chosen in consideration with the number of IP addresses needed and whether we are going to establish connectivity with our data center. The allowed block size is between a /28 netmask and /16 netmask. Amazon VPC can have contain from 16 to 65536 IP addresses. Currently Amazon VPC once created can’t be modified, so it is best to choose the CIDR block which has more IP addresses usually. Also when you design the Amazon VPC architecture to communicate with the on premise/data center ensure your CIDR range used in Amazon VPC does not overlaps or conflicts with the CIDR blocks in your On premise/Data center. Note: If you are using same CIDR blocks while configuring the customer gateway it may conflict.
E.g., Your VPC CIDR block is 10.0.0.0/16 and if you have 10.0.25.0/24 subnet in a data center the communication from instances in VPC to data center will not happen since the subnet is the part of the VPC CIDR. In order to avoid these consequences it is good to have the IP ranges in different class. Example., Amazon VPC is in 10.0.0.0/16 and data center is in 172.16.0.0/24 series.

Practice 3) Isolate according to your Use case: Create separate Amazon VPC for Development , Staging and Production environment (or) Create one Amazon VPC with Separate Subnets/Security/isolated NW groups for Production , Staging and development. We have observed 60% of the customer preferring the second choice. You chose the right one according to your use case.

Practice 4) Securing Amazon VPC : If you are running a machine critical workload demanding complex security needs you can secure the Amazon VPC like your on-premise data center or more sometimes. Some of the tips to secure your VPC are:

• Secure your Amazon VPC using Firewall virtual appliance, Web application firewall available from Amazon Web Services Marketplace. You can use check point, Sophos etc for this
• You can configure Intrusion Prevention or Intrusion Detection virtual appliances and secure the protocols and take preventive/corrective actions in your VPC
• Configure VM encryption tools which encrypts your root and additional EBS volumes. The Key can be stored inside AWS (or) in your Data center outside Amazon Web Services depending on your compliance needs
• Configure Privileged Identity access management solutions on your Amazon VPC to monitor and audit the access of Administrators of your VPC.
• Enable the cloud trail to audit in the VPC environments  ACL policy’s. Enable cloud trail
• Apply anti virus for cleansing specific EC2 instances inside VPC. Trend micro has very good product for this.
• Configure Site to Site VPN for securely transferring information between Amazon VPC in different regions or between Amazon VPC to your On premise Data center
• Follow the Security Groups and NW ACL’s best practices listed below

Practice 5) Understand Amazon VPC Limits:Always design the VPC subnets in consideration with the expansion in the future. Also understand the Amazon VPC’s limits before using the same. AWS has various limitations on the VPC components like Rules per security group, No of route tables and Subnets etc. Some of them may be increased after providing the request to the Amazon support team while few components cannot be increased. Ensure the limitations are not affecting your overall design.

Practice 6) IAM your Amazon VPC: When you are going to assign people to maintain your Amazon VPC you can create Amazon IAM account with the fine grained permissions (or) use Sophisticated Privileged identity Management solutions available on AWS marketplace to IAM your VPC.

Practice 7) Disaster Recovery or Geo Distributed Amazon VPC Setup : When you are designing a Disaster Recovery Setup plan using VPC or expanding to another Amazon VPC region you can follow these simple rules. Create your Production site VPC CIDR : 10.0.0.0/16 and your DR region VPC CIDR:  172.16.0.0/16. Make sure they do not conflict with on premises subnet CIDR block in event both needs to be integrated to on premise DC as well. After CIDR blocks creation , setup a VPC tunnel between regions and to your on premise DC. This will help to replicate your data using private IP’s.

Practice 8) Use security groups and Network ACLs wisely:  It is advisable to use security groups over Network ACLs inside Amazon VPC wherever applicable for better control. Security groups are applicable on EC2 instance level while network ACL is applicable on Subnet level.  Security groups are used for White list mostly. To blacklist IPs, one can use Network ACLs.

Practice 9) Tier your Security Groups : Create different security groups for different tiers of your infrastructure architecture inside your VPC. If you have Web, App, DB tiers create different security group for each of them. Creating tier wise security groups will increase the infrastructure security inside Amazon VPC.  EC2 instances in each tier can talk only on application specified ports and not at all ports. If you create Amazon VPC security groups for each and every tier/service separately it will be easier to open a port to a particular service. Don’t use same security group for multiple tiers of instances, this is a bad practice.

Example: Open ports for security group instead of IP ranges : For example : People have tendency to open for port 8080 to 10.10.0.0/24 (web layer) range. Instead of that, open port 8080 to web-security-group. This will make sure only web security group instances will be able to contact on port 8080. If someone launches NAT instance with NAT-Security-Group in 10.10.0.0/24, he won’t be able to contact on port 8080 as it allows access from only web security group.

Practice 10 ) Standardize your Security Group Naming conventions : Following a security group naming conventions inside Amazon VPC will improve operations/management for large scale deployments inside VPC. It also avoids manual errors, leaks and saves cost and time overall.

For example: Simple ones like Prod_DMZ_Web_SG or Dev_MGMT_Utility_SG (or) complex coded ones for large scale deployments like

USVA5LXWEBP001- US East Virginia AZ 5 Linux Web Server Production 001

This helps in better management of security groups.