Amazon Introduces Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)

Amazon just announced the limited beta of Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), a secure and seamless bridge between existing IT infrastructures and the AWS cloud. Amazon VPC enables us to connect our existing infrastructure to a set of isolated AWS compute resources via a Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection.

“Amazon VPC enables you to use your own isolated resources within the AWS cloud, and then connect those resources directly to your own datacenter using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPN connections. With Amazon VPC, you can:

• Create a Virtual Private Cloud on AWS’s scalable infrastructure, and specify its private IP address range from any block you choose.
• Divide your VPC’s private IP address range into one or more subnets in a manner convenient for managing applications and services you run in your VPC.
• Bridge together your VPC and your IT infrastructure via an encrypted VPN connection.
• Add AWS resources, such as Amazon EC2 instances, to your VPC.
• Route traffic between your VPC and the Internet over the VPN connection so that it can be examined by your existing security and networking assets before heading to the public Internet.
• Extend your existing security and management policies within your IT infrastructure to your VPC as if they were running within your infrastructure.”

Besides the regular ec2 prices, we will have to pay for the VPN connection ($0.05 per VPN Connection-hour) and for the data transfer using the VPN tunnel ($0.10 per GB IN - and starting with $0.17 per GB OUT).

This is a great new service from Amazon that takes the cloud computing offerings to a new level. And this just when major competitors thought they were gaining on Amazon with their offerings, Amazon continues to innovate and launch great new services like this one ;) .