VPC Peering
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
VPC Peering is like building a private bridge between two walled cities. Each VPC is its own isolated network, but peering lets them talk directly without going through the public internet. It's fast, secure, and free (no data transfer charges within the same region). Just don't create overlapping IP ranges or the bridge collapses.
Real Talk
VPC Peering is a networking connection between two VPCs that enables routing traffic between them using private IP addresses. It works across accounts and regions, doesn't require gateways or VPN connections, and traffic stays on the AWS backbone. Peering is non-transitive — if VPC A peers with B and B with C, A cannot reach C through B.
When You'll Hear This
"We peered the production and monitoring VPCs so Prometheus can scrape metrics." / "VPC peering doesn't work transitively — you need a Transit Gateway for hub-and-spoke."
Related Terms
Network Policy
Network policies in Kubernetes are like firewall rules for pods.
Subnet
A subnet is a smaller chunk of a larger network, like dividing a city into neighborhoods. All devices in a subnet can talk to each other directly.
VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)
A VPC is your own private section of the AWS cloud — like a gated neighborhood where your servers live.