Clear and Simple AWS Advanced Networking Specialty

This lesson provides an overview outlining the AWS Networking certification requirements and key areas of focus. It also offers tips and resources to help prepare effectively and succeed in obtaining the certification.

In this video, we explore the basic concepts of Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and its components, such as subnets, route tables, internet gateways, and network ACLs. A VPC is a logically isolated section of the AWS cloud that allows you to manage networking components, control traffic, and create secure connections to your on-premises data center, all while distributing resources across multiple Availability Zones for redundancy and high availability.

In this video, we explore the default VPC that AWS automatically creates in each region when you set up an account. I demonstrate how to view, manage, and even delete or recreate this default VPC, highlighting its components such as subnets, route tables, and the internet gateway, while also explaining why creating a custom VPC might be more suitable for secure, production-level workloads.

In this video, I demonstrate how to create a custom Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in AWS, starting from deleting the default VPC to ensure that all components created are custom. I guide through the manual VPC creation process, including defining the CIDR range, creating subnets, and exploring key settings such as route tables, network ACLs, and IP address assignments, which will serve as the foundation for further demonstrations in the course.

In this video, I walk through key Amazon VPC limits that are important for the exam, highlighting soft limits like the default maximum of five VPCs per region, which can be increased upon request. I recommend memorizing certain limits such as 200 subnets per VPC, five security groups per network interface, and the maximum number of rules for network ACLs and security groups to be well-prepared for the exam.

In this video, we explore how AWS VPC route tables work, focusing on routing traffic between subnets via the built-in VPC router, which is automatically configured and inaccessible for direct modifications. The lesson demonstrates the creation of custom route tables for different subnets, showing how public subnets can be routed to an Internet gateway, while private subnets use a NAT gateway for secure Internet access.

In this video, we demonstrate the basic management of a route table within a VPC, including creating a new route table and associating it with a subnet. We also explore how to modify routes, such as adding a default route to an internet gateway or other endpoints like NAT gateways and VPC peering connections.

In this video, we explore the concept of a dual-homed EC2 instance using elastic network interfaces (ENIs) and elastic IP addresses. The demonstration shows how one ENI can be dedicated to management traffic on a private subnet, while a second ENI, connected to a public subnet, allows internet access, with each ENI having its own security group rules and firewall settings for greater flexibility and security.

In this video, we explore the basics of an Internet Gateway within an AWS VPC and how it facilitates network address translation (NAT). We demonstrate how the Internet Gateway automatically performs Source and Destination NAT, allowing traffic to flow between an EC2 instance's private IP and the public internet without any manual configuration, ensuring seamless connectivity.

In this video, we demonstrate how to create an Internet Gateway in an AWS VPC and attach it to the VPC to enable internet access. Once the Internet Gateway is created, we update the route table to direct outbound traffic through the gateway, allowing EC2 instances in the VPC to connect to the internet.

In this video, I demonstrate how to configure both public and private subnets within an AWS VPC, showing the steps to assign route tables and IP settings to control internet access. The lesson includes creating a public subnet with a route to an internet gateway and configuring automatic public IP assignment for instances, while keeping the private subnet isolated with only local routes.

In this video, we review key facts about VPC and subnet CIDR blocks relevant for the AWS Certified Networking Specialty exam. It covers how to add new IPv4 and IPv6 CIDR ranges to a VPC, noting that existing CIDR ranges cannot be resized, and how to associate an IPv6 CIDR range with a subnet.

In this video, we explore the configuration of EC2 network interfaces and IP addresses within an AWS VPC. It covers how Elastic Network Interfaces (ENIs) can be assigned private and public IP addresses, allowing EC2 instances to communicate within the VPC and with external networks, including the internet.

This lesson demonstrates how to allocate and associate an Elastic IP with an EC2 instance in AWS, ensuring a persistent public IP address even when the instance is stopped and restarted. The instructor walks through the process of creating, attaching, verifying, and eventually disassociating and releasing the Elastic IP, while also highlighting billing considerations and technical details related to network interfaces and IP management.

This lesson demonstrates how to create and attach an Elastic Network Interface (ENI) to an EC2 instance, enabling dual-homing by connecting the instance to both public and private subnets. The instructor explains the configuration process, including IP assignments, security groups, and network ACLs, and emphasizes the importance of managing resources efficiently to avoid unnecessary billing.

This lesson demonstrates how to create and set up a Bastion host (jump box) on AWS, which allows access to privately addressed EC2 instances within a VPC from the internet. The instructor walks through the process of launching an EC2 instance, configuring it with a public IP, setting up RDP access, and using it as a gateway to SSH into other private EC2 instances, emphasizing security and network configuration options.

This lesson explains the concept of enhanced networking and its role in improving network performance for virtual machines by bypassing the traditional virtualization layer using Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). The instructor covers how to enable and verify enhanced networking on EC2 instances, highlights different instance types that support enhanced networking options like the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), and discusses performance capabilities based on instance selection.

This lesson covers the use of placement groups in AWS to enhance network performance and minimize latency for EC2 instances, particularly for latency-sensitive workloads. It explains the different types of placement groups—cluster, partition, and spread—highlighting their applications for improving performance, ensuring availability, and managing instances across physical hosts, data centers, and availability zones.

This lesson explains how to access instance metadata and user data from within an EC2 instance, highlighting the specific IP address (169.254.169.254) used to retrieve this information on port 80. It emphasizes that this access occurs internally within the instance and isn't subject to security groups or network ACLs, but any operating system-based firewall must allow this access for proper functioning, especially in scenarios like monitoring spot instance termination.

This lesson introduces useful AWS Config commands for managing networking resources within an AWS account, such as querying VPC configurations, viewing resource relationships, and checking for attached elastic IPs or associated security groups. The focus is on understanding the EIP_ATTACHED command to manage billing and resources efficiently, while also emphasizing the value of AWS Config in monitoring and auditing network configurations.

This lesson explains how to set up and use NAT instances to provide internet access for instances in private subnets within a VPC, detailing the process of configuring routing tables and source NAT translation. It highlights the limitations and manual efforts involved in managing NAT instances, such as scaling and availability zone failures, while noting that the NAT gateway is a more efficient, managed alternative that will be covered in the next lesson.

This lesson explains NAT gateways, highlighting their role as a managed alternative to NAT instances for providing internet access to private subnets in AWS. It covers their benefits, such as high availability, automatic scaling, and ease of deployment across availability zones, while also discussing limitations like the inability to function as bastion hosts, lack of manual configuration options, and the absence of security group associations.

This lesson demonstrates how to create a NAT gateway in AWS to provide internet access to instances within a private subnet. The instructor walks through setting up the NAT gateway, assigning it an elastic IP, and configuring the route table of the private subnet to direct traffic through the NAT gateway, enabling internet access for private instances without needing to manually manage an EC2 instance or scripts.

This lesson covers key limitations and considerations for NAT gateways relevant to the AWS exam, such as their bandwidth capacity (scaling from 5 to 45 Gbps) and association with one elastic IP per gateway, which cannot be changed post-creation. It also highlights that NAT gateways cannot be associated with security groups, rely on network ACLs for firewall rules, and have port limitations (1024-65535), which may lead to port allocation errors when supporting high-volume traffic from large subnets.

This lesson explains how connection draining in an elastic load balancer ensures that in-flight requests are completed before deregistering or terminating EC2 instances, preventing user disruption. It highlights how to enable connection draining, set the timeout period (1 to 3600 seconds), and how auto scaling respects this setting to avoid prematurely terminating instances.

This lesson explains AWS VPC peering connections, which allow traffic to flow between two VPCs in the same or different AWS accounts, enabling instances to communicate as if they are on the same network. It highlights important considerations such as the need for unique IP address ranges, manual route table updates, and the restriction that transitive peering is not supported, requiring direct peering connections for each VPC needing communication.

This lesson explores various VPC peering design options and architectures, focusing on handling scenarios like overlapping CIDR ranges and implementing shared services VPCs. It explains strategies such as creating more specific routes and duplicating shared services across multiple subnets, highlighting the importance of subnet-specific route tables in managing traffic flow and resolving design challenges for the AWS networking specialty exam.

This lesson addresses how to manage overlapping CIDR ranges in VPC peering scenarios, using a shared services VPC to illustrate solutions when two VPCs share the same address range. The approach includes creating unique subnets within each overlapping VPC and moving instances into these subnets to avoid conflicts in the route tables, ensuring seamless communication between instances in different VPCs without conflicting routes.

This lesson demonstrates how to create a VPC peering connection between two VPCs within the same AWS account and region using the AWS console. It covers the steps of creating a new VPC, configuring subnets, establishing the peering connection, updating route tables, and verifying connectivity between instances across the VPCs to ensure successful communication.

This lesson demonstrates how to configure VPC peering to allow DNS resolution of private IP addresses between VPCs, ensuring that traffic between instances flows over the private AWS network instead of the public internet. The instructor walks through enabling DNS settings in the VPC peering configuration, showing how this change ensures instances in peered VPCs resolve and connect using private IPs rather than public IPs, optimizing security and performance.

This lesson demonstrates the process of cleaning up AWS resources after a VPC peering lab, ensuring no unnecessary charges or complications. The instructor walks through deleting the VPC peering connection, terminating instances, removing VPCs, and updating route tables to remove references to deleted resources.

This lesson highlights important resources to review before taking the AWS networking specialty exam, specifically focusing on VPC peering. It recommends studying the VPC FAQ for detailed insights and familiarizing oneself with VPC peering pricing, noting the current cost per gigabyte for data transfer between VPCs, while cautioning that prices may change.

This lesson explains AWS security groups as stateful firewalls that protect resources within a VPC by controlling inbound and outbound traffic based on predefined rules. It emphasizes the benefits of security groups in enabling micro-segmentation and tiered application security, allowing precise control over traffic flow and enhanced protection for sensitive data without relying on traditional VLAN segmentation.

This lesson explains the differences between AWS security groups and network ACLs, emphasizing that security groups act as stateful firewalls attached to an instance's network interface, while network ACLs are stateless and applied at the subnet level. It highlights the importance of understanding how traffic flows through these components and the need to implement additional OS-level controls to protect instance metadata, as security groups alone do not safeguard it.

This lesson demonstrates how to configure and manage network ACLs in AWS, emphasizing their stateless nature and how they apply rules at the subnet level rather than individual instances. The lesson highlights the importance of ordering rules correctly and ensuring a "deny all" rule at the end for best security practices, while also showing how to customize network ACLs to allow or block specific types of traffic based on business needs.

This lesson demonstrates how to create and manage security groups within an AWS VPC, including setting up rules to control inbound and outbound traffic based on specific IP ranges or other security groups. The video highlights the stateful nature of security groups, allowing return traffic dynamically, and emphasizes best practices for configuring, testing, and cleaning up security group rules to ensure secure and efficient network management.

This lesson explains the role of virtual private gateways (VGWs) in securely connecting on-premises data centers to AWS VPCs through IPSEC VPNs. It covers the traffic flow between the on-premises and cloud environments, highlighting how routes are configured and propagated within AWS to manage network traffic, ensuring secure and efficient connectivity.

This lesson covers the use of VPC endpoints to securely connect AWS VPC resources, like EC2 instances, to public services such as S3 and DynamoDB without traversing the internet. It explains how gateway and interface type endpoints work, their configurations, and how they can be used for secure, private connections, including detailed routing and IAM policy setups for enhanced security.

This lesson demonstrates how to configure a VPC endpoint to securely connect an EC2 instance in a private subnet to S3 without using the internet, ensuring that traffic flows over AWS’s private network. It covers the setup process, configuration checks, and testing the connection, highlighting cost benefits and considerations for using VPC endpoints for secure, region-specific S3 access.

In this lesson, the demonstration shows how to create and manage a VPC endpoint policy to control access to specific S3 buckets and actions. It highlights how to modify the policy to allow or deny specific permissions, demonstrating how granular controls can be applied to manage access securely within a VPC.

This lesson highlights the limitations of Gateway VPC endpoints, emphasizing that while they allow EC2 instances in private subnets to access services like S3, they cannot be accessed from resources outside the VPC, such as those connected via VPN, VPC peering, or Direct Connect. In contrast, interface endpoints are integrated within the VPC, assigned private IPs, and can use security groups, offering more flexibility and control over traffic.

This lesson demonstrates how to set up a VPC interface endpoint to allow secure communication between private subnets and AWS services like EC2 without Internet access. The video shows configuring the endpoint, assigning it to a private subnet, and verifying connectivity through DNS adjustments rather than route table changes, highlighting how interface endpoints can support on-premises connections via Direct Connect or VPN, unlike gateway endpoints.

This lesson introduces AWS PrivateLink and explains how it enables secure connections between a customer's VPC and a vendor’s service hosted within AWS, without using the Internet. The video compares PrivateLink with other methods like VPC peering, highlighting its advantage in securely routing traffic through the AWS backbone, even for connections involving on-premises environments via Direct Connect or VPN.

This lesson demonstrates configuring AWS PrivateLink by setting up a network load balancer and EC2 instances in a vendor VPC, then creating an endpoint service for customer access. It shows how to establish a VPC endpoint in a customer VPC, configure security groups, and verify connectivity using PrivateLink, enabling secure traffic flow between separate VPCs without using VPC peering or the public Internet.

This lesson walks through the cleanup process in AWS after setting up PrivateLink, demonstrating how to terminate temporary EC2 instances, delete endpoint services, endpoints, load balancers, and target groups. It concludes by removing the VPC created for the demo, ensuring the environment is reset for future use.

This lesson explains how to implement a web application firewall (WAF) within an AWS VPC, using either third-party solutions available in the AWS marketplace or AWS's own managed WAF service. It covers the "sandwich" architecture for scalable deployment and highlights AWS's WAF capabilities, including protection against common threats like SQL injection and cross-site scripting, with managed rules and integration options via CloudFront and load balancers.

This lesson discusses the migration from AWS WAF Classic to the newer version of AWS WAF, highlighting the benefits and improvements like AWS managed rules, a new API, and simplified limits based on computing needs. It recommends reviewing AWS documentation for migration guidance, especially if configurations were created before 2019, as the updated version may be relevant for certification exams.

This lesson demonstrates how to configure and use VPC flow logs to monitor traffic within an AWS environment, specifically capturing accepted, rejected, or all traffic information at the VPC, subnet, or EC2 instance level. It details the process of setting up an IAM role, creating a flow log, and analyzing the logs through CloudWatch to verify traffic behavior and security configurations.

This lesson covers essential VPC flow log knowledge for AWS certification, including understanding flow log basics, limitations, and how to interpret flow log records. It emphasizes key facts such as the types of traffic not captured, the creation process, and the need for IAM roles and CloudWatch log groups to manage and analyze flow logs effectively.

This lesson explains how to interpret VPC flow log records, specifically focusing on examples related to security groups and network ACLs. It demonstrates how to analyze flow logs to determine if traffic is blocked by a stateful security group or a stateless network ACL, highlighting the sequence and behavior of these security mechanisms in AWS VPC environments.

This lesson explains how to set up an outbound VPC proxy using a solution like Squid to enforce domain whitelisting and content filtering for EC2 instances in private subnets. It details the architecture, including the use of elastic IPs, auto-scaling groups, and load balancers, ensuring secure and controlled internet access for instances while maintaining scalability and availability across availability zones.

This lesson demonstrates how to perform deep packet inspection within an AWS VPC by utilizing third-party solutions, such as AWS marketplace offerings or tools like Wireshark, implemented through a NAT instance. It emphasizes that AWS-native tools like CloudWatch and VPC flow logs provide traffic summaries and monitoring but are not suitable for deep packet inspection, necessitating the use of specialized software.

This lesson explains how an Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) distributes traffic across multiple EC2 instances to enhance performance and availability, supporting applications across multiple availability zones. It also covers the different types of ELBs—application, network, and classic—and their configurations, including health checks, internal vs. internet-facing ELBs, and how to secure and manage traffic with security groups for improved resilience and security.

This lesson provides a walkthrough on setting up EC2 instances as web servers using Amazon Linux 2 AMI, necessary for demonstrations involving Elastic Load Balancing and Route 53. It covers configuring a public subnet, assigning a public IP, and using a user data script to install and start an Apache web server, ensuring the setup is ready for load balancing and traffic distribution exercises.

This lesson demonstrates how to create a network load balancer in AWS, set up a target group with two EC2 web server instances, and configure health checks to manage traffic distribution. The video shows how the load balancer automatically routes traffic between web servers, ensuring availability by redirecting traffic when one instance is stopped.

This lesson explains how elastic load balancer listeners work, focusing on how they manage incoming connection requests and route them to registered targets based on configured rules. It also details how to set up HTTPS listeners using SSL certificates from AWS Certificate Manager or third-party authorities to offload encryption tasks, highlighting the importance of understanding these concepts for the AWS advanced networking exam.

This lesson explores application load balancer target groups, covering the various target types such as EC2 instances, IP addresses, and Lambda functions. It explains how target groups can be integrated with auto scaling for dynamic scaling, and details features like sticky sessions for maintaining consistent server connections using cookies.

This lesson covers host and path conditions for application load balancers, emphasizing their importance for the AWS Advanced Networking specialty exam. It explains how host conditions route traffic based on subdomains (e.g., dev.example.com), while path conditions route based on URL paths (e.g., /images/*), highlighting their distinct uses and configuration.

This lesson explains how the X-Forwarded header preserves the client’s original IP information when traffic passes through an elastic load balancer, allowing accurate tracking in web server logs. It highlights that both application and classic load balancers have X-Forwarded enabled by default, ensuring seamless visibility of client IPs in server logs.

This lesson introduces VPC Ingress Routing, a feature that allows AWS users to direct incoming traffic through third-party security solutions hosted in their VPC, ensuring consistent security policies similar to their on-premises setups without the need for inefficient routing back to their physical environments. By configuring route tables for Internet gateways or virtual private gateways, users can direct specific traffic to dedicated EC2 instances running security solutions, enabling fine-grained traffic control and efficient threat management.

This lesson covers the Gateway Load Balancer, a feature that enables traffic distribution across a fleet of EC2 instances providing security solutions from the AWS marketplace, ensuring scalability and availability. By using VPC Ingress Routing and Gateway Load Balancer Endpoints, traffic from multiple VPCs can be directed through a centralized security VPC for inspection, preserving original packet details using Geneve encapsulation for consistent and efficient security management across cloud and on-premises environments.

This lesson demonstrates the process of cleaning up resources from the load balancing exercises, focusing on deleting unnecessary load balancers and target groups while retaining the two EC2 instances, Web one and Web two, for use in upcoming Route 53 labs. This ensures efficient resource management while keeping essential instances active for future exercises.

This lesson introduces AWS Route 53, the DNS service of AWS, highlighting its importance as a common entry point for organizations starting to use AWS services. It also explains key DNS record types like A records, AAAA records for IPv6, and CNAME records, emphasizing that CNAME records cannot point to the domain apex.

This lesson demonstrates how to register a new domain with Route 53 and create an alias record that points to an elastic load balancer, distributing traffic across multiple EC2 web server instances. It walks through the process of configuring EC2 instances, setting up a load balancer, and verifying DNS configuration to ensure proper traffic routing to the web servers.

This lesson demonstrates how to create a simple routing policy in Route 53 by setting up an A record that points to the public IP address of an EC2 instance. The video walks through the process of creating the DNS record, verifying its configuration, and ensuring that the domain resolves correctly to the EC2 instance's IP address.

This lesson demonstrates how to create a weighted routing policy in Route 53 by setting up two A records, each pointing to a different EC2 instance with equal weight, ensuring traffic is distributed evenly. The video shows how to verify the routing by flushing DNS cache and testing if the domain resolves to both web servers based on the weighted configuration.

This lesson demonstrates how to configure Route 53 latency-based routing by creating DNS records for EC2 instances in different regions (Ohio and Tokyo) and routing traffic to the instance with the lowest latency. The video verifies the setup by using commands like nslookup to check the IP resolution and confirming that the browser directs traffic to the nearest server based on latency.

This lesson demonstrates configuring Route 53 failover routing by setting up health checks for two EC2 instances in different regions (Ohio and Tokyo) to manage traffic based on server availability. The video walks through creating health checks, configuring failover DNS records, and testing the setup by stopping the primary instance to verify that traffic switches to the secondary instance, ensuring website availability.

This lesson demonstrates setting up geolocation routing in Route 53, directing traffic to the closest regional web server based on the user’s location. The video walks through creating EC2 instances in Ohio and Tokyo, configuring geolocation routing policies, and validating that traffic is correctly directed to the appropriate server before concluding with cleanup steps to avoid unnecessary charges.

This lesson explains the difference between public and private hosted zones in AWS Route 53, focusing on the concept of split horizon DNS to manage internal and external traffic. It highlights the use of private hosted zones within VPCs to resolve internal DNS requests, ensuring that internal traffic stays within the VPC and doesn’t route through the internet.

This lesson demonstrates how to create and configure an AWS Route 53 private hosted zone, associate it with multiple VPCs, and enable DNS resolution for internal resources within those VPCs. It covers setting up EC2 instances, adjusting VPC settings to use private DNS, and testing DNS resolution to ensure it returns the private IPs for resources within the VPC.

This lesson covers configuring hybrid DNS options in AWS Route 53, focusing on setting up inbound endpoints to allow on-premises DNS infrastructure to forward specific queries to Route 53 Resolver within a VPC. It also explains the process of configuring outbound endpoints for forwarding DNS queries from a VPC to an on-premises environment, ensuring proper resolution and communication between networks.

This lesson demonstrates how to use a Route 53 alias record to route traffic to a CloudFront distribution, improving latency for globally distributed users accessing an application. By creating an alias record for a domain apex (e.g., trainertests.com), traffic is redirected to the nearest CloudFront edge location, ensuring faster delivery and lower latency through geographic DNS routing.

This lesson explains how to use AWS CloudFront as a content delivery network (CDN) to cache and distribute content from origins like S3 buckets, EC2 instances, or other servers, reducing latency by serving users from the nearest edge location. It also covers options for managing content updates, securing data using signed URLs, enforcing HTTPS, and protecting web resources with AWS's web application firewall (WAF).

This lesson demonstrates how to create a CloudFront distribution using an S3 bucket as the origin, explaining how to set up and configure distribution settings, such as the origin access identity (OAI) for security and time-to-live (TTL) for content updates. It highlights how CloudFront distributes cached content through edge locations globally to reduce latency and enhance user access speed, emphasizing best practices for accessing and managing distributed content securely.

This lesson explains how to secure CloudFront distributions using HTTPS by configuring cache behaviors to either redirect HTTP traffic to HTTPS or enforce HTTPS-only connections. It covers how to enforce secure communication between CloudFront and its origins, including S3 buckets or custom origins, ensuring compliance with security standards such as PCI by using options like "match viewer" or "HTTPS only" for secure content delivery.

This lesson covers hybrid cloud use cases where AWS integrates with on-premises data centers, such as disaster recovery, cloud bursting for handling temporary increases in workload, and data center extension when physical resources are exhausted. It also explores long-term migration strategies, using AWS as a compliant environment to meet regulatory requirements efficiently, and how organizations can leverage AWS to optimize and secure their infrastructure.

This lesson explores how to set up a software VPN to connect an on-premises data center to an AWS VPC using an EC2 instance running VPN software, such as OpenVPN. It discusses the steps for configuring the VPN, the benefits of flexibility for specific compliance needs, and the drawbacks, including managing the EC2 instances and ensuring availability manually.