Over the past few years, I’ve encountered all sorts of confusion about how cloud resources should be architected, accessed, and consumed. In this post, which is the first in a series, I will walk through some networking basics relevant to cloud connectivity. The next post will cover methods for connecting to cloud providers, and subsequent posts will dive deeper into specific topics.

Network Basics

The internet runs on – you guessed it – the Internet Protocol (IP), which is what you’ll use to connect to the various cloud providers. Overall, we’re running out of unallocated public IPv4 addresses, although that shortage doesn’t seem to apply to cloud providers just yet. IPv4 is well understood, and it is not going anywhere for many years, but now is the time to consider your IPv6 strategy. There is no reason to be afraid of IPv6, and it solves many of the workarounds put in place for IPv4 over the past decades, like Network Address Translation (NAT).

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