Cloud computing is one of the major trends in computing today. Public cloud providers have transformed the high-tech industry and what it means to launch a service from scratch. We no longer need to build our own infrastructure; we can pay the public cloud providers to rent a portion of their resources for our infrastructure needs. Nowadays, walking around any technology conferences or meetups, we will be hard-pressed to find a person who has not learned about, used, or built services based in the cloud. Cloud computing is here, and we better get used to working with it.

There are several service models of cloud computing, roughly divided into Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing#Platform_as_a_service_(PaaS)), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_a_service). Each service model offers a different level of abstraction from the user's perspective. For us, networking is part of the Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering and the focus of this chapter.

Amazon Web Services (AWS—https://aws.amazon.com/) is the first company to offer IaaS public cloud services and the clear leader in the space by market share in 2018. If we define the term Software Defined Networking (SDN) as a group of software services working together to create network constructs – IP addresses, access lists, Network Address Translation, routers – we can make the argument that AWS is the world's largest implementation of SDN. They utilize their massive scale of the global network, data centers, and hosts to offer an amazing array of networking services.

In this chapter, we will discuss the networking services offered by the AWS cloud services and how we can use Python to work with them:

• AWS setup and networking overview
• Virtual private cloud
• Direct Connect and VPN
• Networking scaling services
• Other AWS network services