Amazon VPC enables you to create a virtual topology (including subnets and route tables) for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources. It enables you to create an isolated portion of the AWS cloud (a VPC) and launch Amazon EC2 instances that have private (RFC 1918) addresses in the range of your choice (for example, 10.0.0.0/16).

Amazon VPC provides various levels of security. At the highest level, the VPC enables you to connect to a private network through a VPN tunnel. You can also access the private subnet through an Internet gateway that enables traffic to flow between the Internet and all the instances in your VPC.

You can also configure a VPC to be in-between, with both a VPN gateway and an Internet gateway to enable some instances to receive Internet traffic (for example, web servers), whereas others could remain unexposed (for example, database servers).

This section describes how to deploy a SteelHead-c virtual appliance using different levels of security and includes configuration caveats.