

EC2 Update - Virtual Private Clouds for Everyone - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2013/03/amazon-ec2-update-virtual-private-clouds-for-everyone.html

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RyanGWU82
This isn't getting much attention on HN, but this is a Big Deal.

It's important to be on Virtual Private Cloud for a few reasons. Here are a
few:

1\. VPC gets you out of the EC2 private IP space, and lets you configure
instances without public IPs either. This helps prevent accidental
misconfigurations, like accidentally letting the whole world connect to your
Memcache.

2\. If you want to connect a VPN to your physical infrastructure, or to
connect servers across multiple regions, VPC makes that _much_ easier.

3\. Amazon's stopped launching new networking features on standard EC2, so if
you want to do things like change the security group of a running instance,
you can only do that in VPC.

The problem is, most startups don't think about VPC prior to launching,
because these things don't matter much when you're just starting out. But
unlike most early ops shortcuts, it's a _huge_ pain to migrate to VPC later.
It's basically the same effort as moving data centers, except for actually
carrying servers around in your hatchback.

Now new customers won't have to think about VPC upfront, but also won't have
to go through a messy and time-consuming migration. Although this won't help
existing EC2 deployments, this is a huge win for new AWS customers.

