An illustrated guide to Amazon VPCs
13 comments
·May 31, 2025MehdiHK
egonschiele
Thank you, I'm glad you liked the book!! That was a fun project, and I learned a lot while writing it.
davesmylie
I was pretty late to the AWS bandwagon (maybe 2019ish) but I had no idea there was a point when your resources were directly addressable by other customers.
I'm surprised they got anyone signing up at all - though I suppose back then having just about everything directly connect to the internet was much more of the norm
pram
It was unironically pretty convenient. You had to manually set up NAT in a VPC for a long time (until they made NAT gateways) and some other early quirks were a pain in the ass. EC2 "classic" still had security groups and it was pretty effortless otherwise for a small deployment since it's connected to the internet from the start.
pugz
If you want to read more, it was called "EC2 Classic" (well, it wasn't called that before VPCs were launched!). There was a discussion about it being retired on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988964
cmckn
My recollection is that for a period of time, as a part of the internal “Move to AWS” (MAWS) campaign, the entire retail business ran within a single VPC. A lot has changed!
spwa4
That's crazy. That would never work unless these are just a VLAN configured on existing switches. Even VXLAN wouldn't be able to do that 5 years ago.
elchananHaas
Running out of IP addresses within that VPC is a real difficulty for services still using it.
UltraSane
AWS developed their own custom overlay networking system. It embeds tenant IDs into the packets for isolation
bspammer
I was also surprised by this, does that mean it used to be impossible to not have a publicly routable IP in AWS?
egonschiele
Hey everyone, I'm the author. Let me know if you have any questions!
sceadu
are you planning on turning this into a book also? if so I'd be interested. the blog posts were very helpful :)
v5o
[dead]
Not related to VPC, but I'm a big fan of the author. Loved his book "Grokking Algorithms: An Illustrated Guide for Programmers and Other Curious People" when it came out a few years ago. If you know anyone struggling with common data structures and algorithms, this book can make it fun for them.