I'm new to this and currently taking a Coursera course on AWS to expand my career into cloud and DevOps. While studying about route tables and VPCs to understand their security better, I wanted to clarify: are all EC2 instances necessarily part of a VPC?
3 Answers
Yes, all EC2 instances are indeed part of a VPC. You can think of a VPC as a network container, and anything connected to that network—like EC2 instances—has an IP address that comes from the VPC's CIDR block. So, launching an EC2 instance without a VPC isn’t possible.
It's good to know that all EC2 instances are now required to be in a VPC. Although there used to be a classic link option in the past, that’s been retired, so it’s all VPC-based now.
Definitely! By default, every EC2 instance goes into the default VPC for each region. However, you can create custom VPCs if you prefer a different setup. But just keep in mind, you can't launch an EC2 instance outside of a VPC.
Got it! That makes it clearer on how AWS structures things. I'm still wrapping my head around network ACLs and security groups, though. They seem opposite, right?