AWS Introduces PrivateLink For More-Scalable, Secure Connections To Popular Services

Amazon Web Services has introduced a next-generation solution that offers more-scalable and secure connectivity between virtual networks and endpoint services in its public cloud.

The new solution, PrivateLink, advances VPC Endpoints, an offering Amazon launched in 2015 to help customers running virtual private clouds to directly access storage and database services without routing traffic onto the public internet.

While VPC Endpoints provided direct access to S3 Storage and the DynamoDB database across Amazon's own network, PrivateLink makes APIs available to customers inside their virtual private clouds, delivering greater availability and scalability, wrote Jeff Barr, AWS' chief evangelist in a blog post.

[Related: Partners Praise AWS For Solving Intra-Region Connectivity Challenges With New Offering]

Kinesis, Service Catalog, Amazon EC2, EC2 Systems Manager (SSM), and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) APIs are already available for use inside a VPC. Support for other services, including Key Management Service (KMS) and Amazon Cloudwatch, is coming soon, Barr said.

"Using the services powered by PrivateLink, customers can now manage fleets of instances, create and manage catalogs of IT services as well as store and process data, without requiring the traffic to traverse the Internet," Barr said.

PrivateLink endpoints use IP addresses from the customers VPC. Users can implement identity and access management policies to control access to resources.

Jamie Begin, CEO of RightBrain Networks, an AWS partner based in Ann Arbor, Mich., told CRN PrivateLink will allow enterprises to more precisely manage and monitor traffic flow between their EC2 fleet, on-premises resources, and other AWS products.

The offering will give additional control to information security teams, Begin said, "who are often innately uncomfortable with the black box nature of the public cloud."

At the same time, that granular level of control "is likely only to be of interest to the small subset of customers that have exceptionally sophisticated security policies," Begin told CRN.

Pricing for PrivateLink starts at $0.01 per hour, plus a data-processing charge of $0.01 per gigabyte.