Well we have covered a lot in this chapter, but there are a few things still that you can try out on your own with regards to VPCs. First up, is cleaning up a VPC! Creating a VPC is easy enough and so is its deletion. You can delete an unused VPC from the VPC Management dashboard by simply selecting the VPC, clicking on the Actions tab, and selecting the Delete VPC option. This will bring up the Delete VPC dialog as shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see, the delete VPC option will delete all aspects of your VPC, including subnets, Network ACLs, Internet Gateways, and so on. You can optionally even delete any VPN connections as well by selecting the Delete VPN Connections when deleting the VPC checkbox. Remember that once you delete a VPC, you can't recover it back, so make sure that you don't have any active instances running on it before you go ahead and delete it. Also remember to clean up on the instances as well, especially the NAT Instance and the Bastion Host if you have created them.

The second thing that I would recommend trying out is called as VPC peering. VPC peering is nothing more than network connections between two different VPCs. Instances in one VPC communicate with instances present in another VPC using their private IP addresses alone, so there is no need to route the traffic over the Internet as well. You can connect your VPC with a different VPC that is either owned by you or by someone else's Bastion Host. All it needs is a request to be generated from the source VPC and sent to the destination VPC, along with a few route rules that will allow the traffic to flow from one point to the other. The following is the image describing the VPC peering:

You can read more about VPC peering at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/vpc-peering.html.

The third thing that really is worth testing out is the hardware VPN connectivity with your VPC. I know you are probably thinking that since it's a hardware VPN connectivity, it means that I need some special hardware equipment like a router and so on. Well that's not quite true! You can set up an easy VPN connection using software as well, for example, OpenVPN. OpenVPN basically allows you to create a secure network connection from your local network to Amazon VPC using a VPN connection.

All you need to do is deploy an OpenVPN server in your VPC and configure that to accept incoming traffic from your private network. Then, install an OpenVPN client on your remote desktop and try connecting to the OpenVPN server placed in the VPC. If all goes well, you should have access to your VPC instances from your local desktop! Do note that you will have to open up additional security rules and network ACLs to allow this type of traffic to flow through your VPC subnet.

Last but not least, I would also recommend for you to have a look at VPC's Flow Logs. This is a simple logging feature provided in VPC to capture traffic information and store it using Amazon CloudWatch Logs. Flow Logs can help you analyze your network traffic flow for bottlenecks, observe certain traffic trends, as well as monitor traffic that reaches your instances. You can read more about Flow Logs at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/flow-logs.html.