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I had originally written this article for xmodulo . If you have a lot of your services hosted in the Amazon AWS public cloud, and are looking for ways to access your leased AWS resources in a secure way, this article is for you. Initially you started out accessing Amazon AWS over the public Internet. Over time, you have migrated more and more services to your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using the architecture of your choice -- multi-tiered servers, load balancers, auto-scaled, managed database, hosting services internal to your organization, and so on. Now you realize that routing all your traffic to and from AWS over the public Internet is no longer viable because of security concerns and/or company policies. Moreover, it makes more sense to access services internal to your company using private IP addresses. Amazon AWS provides multiple options if you want to access your Amazon VPC's private IP address space directly from your LAN. All these options are secure as the tra...

This article was originally written for xmodulo . A virtual private network (VPN) tunnel is used to securely interconnect two physically separate networks through a tunnel over the Internet. Tunneling is needed when the separate networks are private LAN subnets with globally non-routable private IP addresses, which are not reachable to each other via traditional routing over the Internet. For example, VPN tunnels are often deployed to connect different NATed branch office networks belonging to the same institution. Sometimes VPN tunneling may be used simply for its security benefit as well. Service providers or private companies may design their networks in such a way that vital servers (e.g., database, VoIP, banking servers) are placed in a subnet that is accessible to trusted personnel through a VPN tunnel only. When a secure VPN tunnel is required,  IPsec  is often a preferred choice because an IPsec VPN tunnel is secured with multiple layers of security. This tutori...