5 Best AWS Networking Tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is recognized as one of the world's leading cloud providers, but if you're new to the cloud and AWS, the terminology can seem cryptic and the concepts foreign.

With a little digging, however, you'll find that the technologies are built with elements that are likely similar to those in an on-premises network environment. As an introduction, let's take a look at five of the most important AWS networking tools.

1. Amazon VPC — Your Private Network Inside AWS

Amazon VPC is still the backbone of AWS networking. Nothing has replaced it, and nothing is likely to. If you run anything in AWS, you’re using a VPC—whether you realize it or not. You likely receive a ready-made default VPC with your initial cloud purchase. Think of it as your own piece of the cloud. It's private, meaning you control access and usage. And it's no longer dependent on the expensive equipment housed in your company's rented data center space.

The network hosting business has been around since the internet boom of the 1990s. But with the VPC, you can leave that all in the 20th century. If you think of the VPC as a virtual network hosting environment with capabilities similar to a hosting space in a physical facility, you would not be far off.

Consider the similarities. Every network needs a connection to the internet, and in the AWS world, those are called internet gateways. Route tables, once the domain of dedicated physical routers, are maintained in the VPC to direct traffic. Network access control lists (NACLs) in the VPC do the work of firewalls. EC2 instances manage the CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity that we once relied on various network devices to provide.

2. Amazon Route 53 — DNS and Traffic Routing for AWS Resources

Another important tool in your AWS networking toolset deals with domain name service (DNS) configuration. As you know, DNS correlates IP addresses with domain names. It's like a phone directory for domains. The name references the TCP or UDP port number used for DNS. Without DNS, users could not access any of the internet services a company may offer. DNS servers direct a user to the desired server.

But Amazon's DNS tool can do more than map a domain name to an IP address. You can use Route 53 to map domain names directly to an AWS resource, such as an EC2 instance or an Amazon S3 bucket.

You can set up DNS failover, which redirects users to a backup resource if the primary resource fails. And you can use Route 53 to monitor the health of your web servers and applications.

3. Amazon Elastic Load Balancing — Distributing Traffic Across Multiple Resources

We've already heard horror stories about servers crashing due to a sudden surge of internet traffic. Load-balancing techniques were developed to accommodate such occurrences. Amazon's Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) is AWS’s managed service for distributing incoming traffic across multiple targets to improve availability, scalability, and fault tolerance.

AWS currently offers three types of load balancers:

• Classic Load Balancer (CLB): Legacy only

• Network Load Balancer (NLB): Layer 4 (TCP/UDP)

• Application Load Balancer (ALB): Layer 7 (HTTP/HTTPS)

Classic Load Balancers were designed for the old EC2-Classic network and are now deprecated. They should not be used in new deployments and are typically found only in older, long-running environments.

Network Load Balancers operate at Layer 4 and are built for extreme performance and low latency. They’re commonly used for high-throughput workloads, TCP- or UDP-based applications, and scenarios where preserving the client’s source IP is important, such as hybrid networking or certain containerized services.

Application load balancing is commonly used in AWS. Using target groups, you can balance traffic across multiple EC2 instances. ALBs can be host-based or path-based. 

The great thing about ALBs with Amazon Elastic Load Balancing is that you can efficiently distribute application traffic to multiple cloud resources without the user ever knowing it. The scalability and flexibility of ALBs give today's demanding cloud applications greater power and versatility.

4. AWS Transit Gateway — Connecting VPCs and On-Premises Networks

Configuring scalable services on AWS is all well and good, but none of it matters without reliable and secure connectivity. Without an AWS Transit Gateway, you would need to peer at each VPC and link each on-site connection through a complex web of VPNs. An AWS Transit Gateway provides connectivity between multiple Amazon VPCs, on-premises data centers, and remote offices using a single networking tool.

Using an AWS Transit Gateway allows any part of your VPC network environment to communicate with any other part. By attaching multiple VPCs to your transit gateway, you create encrypted tunnels that enable secure "any to any" communication. Each account is limited to five transit gateways, and all VPCs must be within the same region.

5. Amazon CloudFront — Global Content Delivery and Edge Caching

In today's application-centric global networks, it's hard to separate service delivery from networking. A content delivery network (CDN) combines all those functions as a single concept. Amazon CloudFront is an AWS-based CDN that improves the efficiency of distributing data across geographically dispersed networks worldwide. As a networking tool, Amazon CloudFront should not be overlooked.

As the reach of global networks expanded over the years, network managers found a lag in transmitting data-heavy content over long distances. CDNs offer lower latency by caching content on edge devices closer to end users.

Amazon CloudFront is a fast, secure, and programmable cloud-based CDN that ably handles both static and dynamic content. It also checks all the boxes for DDoS protection, compliance, and web application firewall (WAF) security.

Final Thoughts

There are a plethora of tools and services available on AWS that fit on a list of top networking tools. Cloud computing on AWS is fairly mature now, and there are plenty of reasons to move an organization's IT resources to the cloud. 

It's also clear that networking has changed considerably since the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. We can only expect more amazing advances in the years to come.

Want to keep learning AWS? Explore CBT Nuggets AWS certification training or check out our IT career guides to learn how different cloud roles work.