PostHole
Compose
Login
SE Radio 586: Nikhil Shetty on Virtual Private Cloud
Nikhil Shetty, an expert in networking and distributed systems, speaks with SE radio's Kanchan Shringi about virtual private cloud (VPC) and related technologies. They explore how VPC relates to public cloud, private cloud, and virtual private networks (VPNs). The discussion delves into why VPC is fundamental to building on the cloud, as well as configuring a VPC, subnets, and the address space that can be assigned to the VPC. During this episode they look into route tables, network address translation, as well as security groups, network access control lists, and DNS. Finally, Nikhil helps compare VPC offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Nikhil Shetty, an expert in networking and distributed systems, speaks with SE radio’s Kanchan Shringi about virtual private cloud (VPC) and related technologies. They explore how VPC relates to public cloud, private cloud, and virtual private networks (VPNs). The discussion delves into why VPC is fundamental to building on the cloud, as well as configuring a VPC, subnets, and the address space that can be assigned to the VPC. During this episode they look into route tables, network address translation, as well as security groups, network access control lists, and DNS. Finally, Nikhil helps compare VPC offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
This episode is sponsored by ClickSend.
SE Radio listeners can get a $50 credit by following the link below.
Show Notes
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number and URL.
Kanchan Shringi 00:00:48 Hi all. Welcome to this episode of Software Engineering Radio. Our guest today is Nikhil Shetty. Nikhil is an expert in networking and distributed systems. He has worked at Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, and Oracle Cloud infrastructure. For Oracle Cloud infrastructure, Nikhil has helped design and develop the monitoring and automation platforms that manage OCIs global network. He’s currently helping develop service for OCIs AI super cluster networks. His interests include network observability, data pipelines, and control planes. I like to point out that Nikhil and I both work for Oracle. Nikhil was introduced to me and he came highly recommended by someone in my network when I was looking for a guest to speak about this topic on VPC. Nikhil, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here. Is there anything else you’d like to add to your bio before we get started?
Nikhil Shetty 00:01:43 Thanks for having me here Kanchan. This is a great opportunity for me and I would like to really thank you for inviting me into this podcast. Nothing else to add. You’ve given a great introduction of yourself. Thank you.
Kanchan Shringi 00:01:57 Great. So let’s just start with describing the big picture for some time. And the very first question would be, what is a virtual Private Cloud? And then we will go on to discuss why is it fundamental to building on the cloud? What is the underlying technology and some issues and monitoring aspects. But can you describe what is a virtual Private Cloud?
Nikhil Shetty 00:02:24 Yeah, so I think before we start here, I think one of the things in these fields in networking and other fields is that experts tend to use acronyms, right? So you’ll use terms like VPC, VPN and things like that. So you’ll hear a lot of acronyms. What you want to do is, over my experience over all the years has been, dig in deeper into that acronym, see what each of those terms like stand for. So in this particular case, VPC stands for virtual Private Cloud, as you clearly mentioned, if you dig into it, the first term would be virtual. So obviously it’s virtual rather than physical, right? So that itself kind of gives you some hint about what this is. The next term is private, right? So private is, it’s not public, right?
Nikhil Shetty 00:03:10 It’s the opposite of public. So it’s something that kind of gives you another hint about what this thing is. And finally, cloud, right? Cloud is something that’s running not on your laptop or desktop, but it’s running somewhere else and you’re connecting to it or the network, right? So now if you put all of these together, a virtual Private Cloud would be a cloud that is not physically yours, right? So it’s virtually yours, it’s private, that means it’s not public, which means others cannot see your traffic. There might be other customers who cannot actually access the traffic that you’re sending on this particular cloud. And then of course it’s a cloud. So it’s not on your laptop or desktop, it’s somewhere sitting connected to the network basically, right? So a bunch of software and services and you have a network, most likely the internet over which you’re going to access these services.
Nikhil Shetty 00:04:04 So essentially that’s what a virtual Private Cloud would be. Where it becomes interesting is what is the relationship with a public cloud, right? So what’s a public cloud? So by definition of public cloud would be one of the big hyperscalers, like AWS, GCP, OCI, things like that. These are all public clouds. The reason they’re public is because they’re publicly accessible. All the services and softwares publicly accessible. Some of the services may also be accessible over the internet, right? But what you, when you have a virtual public virtual Private Cloud within a public cloud, what it means is you get your own chunk of that public cloud in which you can run your own software and services and it’ll be virtual obviously, because it’s not physically yours, it’ll be private. So others cannot view it. It’s isolated from other customers. And of course it’s running in the cloud. So that’s what I would call VPC.
Kanchan Shringi 00:04:59 However, there’s another term called Private Cloud, which I believe is stands for something quite different. Do you want to clarify?
Nikhil Shetty 00:05:08 Yeah. So Private Cloud in general, it kind of refers to your on-premise networks. So traditionally, all your software and services, they have been delivered through private data centers. Like so essentially this is like physically private data centers that you own. You own all the servers, you’d own the networking, you’d own all the storage, right? And that would be your Private Cloud, right? So that is when you say cloud, usually expect things like–hey, I get on demand compute, I get storage on demand, things like that. So those things you could replicate in your own on-premise data center, right? You could have, like for example, VMware that manages your servers. You get VMs on the fly. You could have some kind of maybe a NetApp storage grid that kind of gives you object storage kind of services. So you could do all the services that are running in the cloud in your own private data center.
[...]