How to get started with Alibaba Cloud’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure and networking architecture.
What Is Alibaba Cloud Networking?
Alibaba Cloud Networking allows you to build complex networked virtual architectures that mimic your physical network infrastructure in simple steps via the Alibaba Cloud web user interface.
Prerequisites
• You’ll need an Alibaba Cloud account – we’ll assume you already have one.
• You’ll need Alibaba Cloud Resource Access Management (RAM) authorization and an Access Key – we’ll assume you have set these up already.
• Whenever we need to pick a region, we’ll use US East 1 (Virginia).
• Anything else that comes up, we’ll show you as we go along.
Set up and Configure a Virtual Private Cloud Network
Login to your Alibaba Cloud account and select Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) on the Products page.
Select the location
Then Select Virtual Private Cloud and Click – Create VCP
Configuration options will appear for the VPC and the VSwitch which ships with the VPC.
First, give your VPC a name and set the destination CIDR block. Remember, you cannot change the CIDR block configuration once you have set it. Here, we have set the CIDR block to 192.168.0.0/16 as an example. This CIDR block allows us 65,534 possible host IP addresses in our VPC.
Give the VSwitch a name and configure the CIDR block for the VSwitch. Again, once you have set the CIDR block for the VSwitch it cannot be changed. Here, we have given the VSwitch a smaller range of the available VPC private IP addresses with 192.168.0.0/24 which allows us 254 possible hosts.
This VSwitch will manage a subsection of our VPC infrastructure.
When you’re done, click OK.
Once the VPC and VSwitch are configured, check the details. Notice that the VPC and VSwitch are given unique ID numbers. Click Complete to create the VPC.
You will now see your VPC in the list for the region. Notice the Route Table that comes with every VPC and the VSwitch which we just configured.
