AWS Quick Starts

Amazon VPC Architecture

Modular and scalable virtual networking foundation on the AWS Cloud

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Quick Start architecture for scalable VPC in the AWS Cloud


This Quick Start provides a networking foundation based on AWS best practices for your AWS Cloud infrastructure. It builds an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) environment with public and private subnets where you can launch AWS services and other resources.  

Use this Quick Start as a building block for your own deployments. You can scale it up or down as needed, and add other infrastructure components and software layers to complete your AWS environment.

For additional Quick Starts, see the complete catalog.

  • What you'll build

    You'll build a VPC environment with the following features:

    • Up to four Availability Zones for high availability and disaster recovery. Availability Zones are geographically distributed within a region and spaced for best insulation and stability in the event of a natural disaster. AWS recommends maximizing your use of Availability Zones to isolate a data center outage.
    • Separate subnets for unique routing requirements. AWS recommends using public subnets for external-facing resources and private subnets for internal resources. For each Availability Zone, this Quick Start provisions one public subnet and one private subnet by default.
    • Additional layer of security. AWS recommends using network access control lists (ACLs) as firewalls to control inbound and outbound traffic at the subnet level. This Quick Start provides an option to create a network ACL protected subnet in each Availability Zone. These network ACLs provide individual controls that you can customize as a second layer of defense.
    • Independent routing tables configured for every private subnet to control the flow of traffic within and outside the Amazon VPC. The public subnets share a single routing table, because they all use the same Internet gateway as the sole route to communicate with the Internet.
    • Highly available NAT gateways, where supported, instead of NAT instances. NAT gateways offer major advantages in terms of deployment, availability, and maintenance.
    • Spare capacity for additional subnets, to support your environment as it grows or changes over time.


    For details, see the Quick Start deployment guide.

  • Deployment details

    Build your VPC environment in less than 5 minutes:

    1. Sign up for an AWS account.
    2. Launch the Quick Start.
    3. Add other services or applications.  


    To customize your deployment, you can choose the number of Availability Zones you want to use for resource distribution, reconfigure the subnet segmentation and sizing for the VPC, and create additional private subnets with custom network ACLs.

    For complete details, see the Quick Start deployment guide.

  • Cost and licenses

    You are responsible for the cost of the AWS services used while running this Quick Start reference deployment. There is no additional cost for using the Quick Start.

    The AWS CloudFormation template for this Quick Start includes configuration parameters that you can customize. Some of the settings, such as the instance type, number of Availability Zones, use of NAT gateways or NAT instances (depending on the AWS Region you choose), and amount of data that flows through the NAT device, will determine the cost of deployment. For pricing details, see the Amazon EC2 pricing and Amazon VPC pricing pages.