Internet Gateway
A horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between instances in your VPC and the internet.
Description
An Internet Gateway in Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a critical component for connecting Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) to the internet. It serves two primary purposes: providing a target in your VPC route tables for internet-routable traffic and performing network address translation (NAT) for instances that have been assigned public IP addresses. When you attach an Internet Gateway to your VPC, it enables the instances within the VPC to communicate with the external internet while also allowing incoming traffic from the internet to reach those instances. This is particularly important for web applications that need to be accessible by users globally. For example, if you host a web server within your VPC, the Internet Gateway allows users to connect to it via the public IP address assigned to that server. Additionally, it supports IPv4 and IPv6 traffic, making it versatile for various applications and services deployed in the cloud.
Examples
- A web application hosted on EC2 instances that require public access to users worldwide.
- A Lambda function that needs to access external APIs over the internet for data processing.
Additional Information
- An Internet Gateway is fully managed by AWS, meaning it automatically scales with your traffic needs.
- It is important to configure security groups and network ACLs properly to control the traffic flow to and from instances using the Internet Gateway.