VPC Lattice moves service networking up to Layer 7
VPC Lattice registers services into a shared service network with automatic discovery, IAM-based authorization, and path-based routing, without per-pair endpoint configuration.
Speaker notes
- VPC Lattice operates at Layer 7, a genuinely different layer from PrivateLink's ENI-based Layer 4 approach: you register a service into a service network, associate VPCs (across accounts) with that network, and any associated VPC can reach any registered service, with no per-pair endpoint or peering configuration required at all.
- Because it's Layer 7, VPC Lattice natively supports path-based routing and weighted traffic splitting (canary and blue/green deployments) and enforces request-level IAM authorization policies, capabilities that are simply unavailable to PrivateLink or VPC peering, which have no visibility into HTTP semantics at all.
- AWS's own guidance and the emerging 2026 enterprise pattern: use Transit Gateway for the network backbone (routing between VPCs and on-premises), VPC Lattice for service-to-service microservice communication within that backbone, and PrivateLink specifically for exposing a service externally to a vendor or partner. The three aren't competing choices, they're different layers of the same architecture, each solving the problem the others don't.
Deck map
01
AWS Networking, end to end
02
The certification landscape: Associate to Professional to Specialty
03
The VPC is the network; everything else attaches to it
04
A subnet lives in exactly one AZ, and that's the whole point
05
The route table decides, the resource doesn't
06
An Internet Gateway makes a subnet public, nothing else does
07
NAT Gateway vs. NAT Instance: managed reliability vs. control
08
Security Groups are stateful, and that's the whole trick
09
Two firewalls, two layers, evaluated in a fixed order
10
Elastic IPs and ENIs: identity that outlives the instance
11
VPC Peering is direct, private, and never transitive
12
Gateway endpoints are free; interface endpoints are PrivateLink
13
ALB, NLB, and Gateway Load Balancer solve different problems
14
Six routing policies, one DNS service
15
CloudFront optimizes what's delivered, not how it travels
16
Shield, WAF, and the edge defense stack
17
VPC Flow Logs: the record of what actually happened
18
Transit Gateway: from N-squared peering to one hub
19
Direct Connect: a physical circuit, not a tunnel
20
Direct Connect resiliency is a model you choose, not a default
21
Direct Connect Gateway: one circuit, many regions
22
Site-to-Site VPN and Client VPN solve different connectivity problems
23
Choosing hybrid connectivity: bandwidth vs. lead time vs. cost
24
Cloud WAN: the network becomes a policy document
25
VPC sharing: one network, many accounts
26
PrivateLink: a service exposed as an ENI, nothing more
27
VPC Lattice moves service networking up to Layer 7
28
PrivateLink vs. VPC Lattice vs. Transit Gateway: the 2026 pattern
29
Route 53 Resolver: DNS that crosses the on-premises boundary
30
Five layers deep: NACL to Shield Advanced
31
Global Accelerator: two static IPs, one fast path
32
Three tools that answer 'why can't this reach that'
33
IPv6 in AWS is additive, not a migration
34
Bandwidth is a design decision, not a given
35
Scenario: a global SaaS platform's hub-and-spoke backbone
36
Scenario: a trading platform's latency and compliance walls
37
Scenario: merging two companies' networks without an outage
38
Scenario: a network that survives losing a region
39
Scenario: exiting a data center without a hard cutover
40
The Advanced Networking Specialty exam, domain by domain
41
The traps that recur across every certification level
42
Quick-fire recall
43
The one-page decision cheat sheet
44
Readiness checklist: is this network actually enterprise-grade?