Peered VPCs

Overview

The Peered VPCs insight offers visibility into Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) peering connections within your AWS environment. This information is vital for IT Operations (IT Ops) and Security Operations (Sec Ops) engineers to ensure secure, efficient, and compliant inter-VPC communication.

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Value to IT and Security Engineers

For IT Engineers:

• Connectivity Management: Provides a clear view of VPC peering connections, helping to ensure that resources across VPCs can communicate effectively.

• Troubleshooting Inter-VPC Issues: Simplifies the process of identifying connectivity problems between peered VPCs.

• Scalability Planning: Enables engineers to track the number and status of VPC peering connections, assisting in capacity planning and resource allocation.

• Cost Awareness: Helps monitor VPC peering configurations to identify unnecessary or underutilized connections that may contribute to increased costs.

For Security Engineers:

• Access Control Validation: Ensures that peered VPCs adhere to strict security controls, such as limiting access to specific CIDR ranges.

• Compliance Monitoring: Verifies that peered VPCs are configured according to organizational and regulatory standards.

• Threat Containment: Identifies misconfigured or insecure peering setups that could allow unauthorized traffic between VPCs.

• Network Segmentation: Helps validate that VPCs are properly segmented and peered only when necessary, reducing the potential attack surface.

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Key Use Cases

1. Monitoring Peering Connections: IT Ops can use the Peered VPCs insight to track all active peering connections, ensuring no critical connections are missing or misconfigured.

2. Optimizing Network Topology: Engineers can identify redundant or inefficient peering setups and reconfigure the topology for better performance and cost savings.

3. Securing Inter-VPC Communication: Sec Ops can validate that all peering connections are established with the correct security groups, ACLs, and routing policies.

4. Compliance Reporting: This insight enables teams to verify that VPC peering connections adhere to organizational compliance policies, including proper tagging and documentation.

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Actionable Insights

• Review Peering Connection Status: Regularly inspect the status of all VPC peering connections to ensure active and healthy communication.

• Validate Peering Routes: Check that routes are properly propagated between peered VPCs to avoid connectivity issues.

• Enforce Access Controls: Ensure that peered VPCs only allow traffic from approved CIDR ranges and maintain strict network segmentation.

• Identify Unused Connections: Locate and terminate peering connections that are no longer needed to reduce costs and simplify the network topology.

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Additional Recommendations

• Automate Monitoring: Use AWS tools like CloudWatch or AWS Config to monitor peering connection changes and set alerts for anomalies.

• Enable Logging: Activate VPC Flow Logs for peered VPCs to gain visibility into traffic patterns and detect unauthorized activity.

• Establish Peering Policies: Define organizational policies for VPC peering, including approval workflows, routing guidelines, and tagging requirements.

• Limit Cross-VPC Exposure: Use security groups, network ACLs, and routing policies to enforce strict communication rules between peered VPCs.

The Peered VPCs insight equips IT Ops and Sec Ops engineers with the necessary tools to manage, secure, and optimize inter-VPC connectivity, ensuring a robust and compliant AWS networking environment.