VPC (Virtual Private Cloud)

Your own private network inside an AWS Region.

Think of it as: A fenced-off private estate inside the city.

What to know for Level 0

Every account has a default VPC in every Region, already set up with public subnets, so you can launch EC2 straight away.
EC2 instances, RDS databases, Fargate tasks and VPC-attached Lambda functions live inside your VPC. API Gateway, S3, DynamoDB, SQS and CloudWatch Logs are public AWS services outside it, reached through the internet gateway, a NAT gateway or a VPC endpoint.
A gateway endpoint (for S3 and DynamoDB) gives the VPC a route to the service that never crosses the internet, and it costs nothing. More in Level 1.

More detail

Things you run, like EC2 instances, RDS databases and Fargate tasks, live inside a VPC. Nothing gets in or out unless you open a path. Every account has a default VPC in each Region, already set up with public subnets, so you can launch things straight away. Level 1 builds a custom one.

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