Yes, you can create a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) that spans multiple Availability Zones (AZs) within the same AWS Region. In fact, it's a best practice to design your VPC to span multiple AZs to achieve fault tolerance and high availability for your network resources.
When you create a VPC in AWS, you have the option to specify the number of AZs that the VPC will span. By default, a new VPC is created with subnets in one AZ, but you can easily add additional subnets in other AZs within the same VPC.
Here's how you can create a VPC spanning multiple AZs:
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Create the VPC: Go to the AWS Management Console, navigate to the VPC dashboard, and click on "Create VPC." Specify the IPv4 CIDR block for your VPC, and optionally, the IPv6 CIDR block. When creating the VPC, choose the option to enable multiple AZs.
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Create Subnets: After creating the VPC, you can create subnets within each AZ that the VPC spans. For each subnet, specify the IPv4 CIDR block, the AZ in which it resides, and other configuration options such as route tables and network ACLs.
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Configure Route Tables and Internet Gateways: Configure route tables and associate them with the subnets in your VPC. If your application requires internet access, you can attach an internet gateway to your VPC and update the route tables to route traffic destined for the internet through the gateway.
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Security Groups and Network ACLs: Define security groups and network ACLs to control inbound and outbound traffic to and from your resources within the VPC. Ensure that these security measures are configured consistently across all subnets and AZs within the VPC.
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Deploy Resources: With your VPC set up to span multiple AZs, you can now deploy your EC2 instances, RDS databases, Elastic Load Balancers, and other resources across the subnets in different AZs. Distributing your resources across multiple AZs enhances fault tolerance and availability for your applications.
By creating a VPC that spans multiple AZs, you ensure that your network resources are distributed across physically separate and isolated data centers within the same region, reducing the risk of downtime or data loss due to failures in any single AZ. This architecture improves the reliability, availability, and resilience of your applications and services hosted on AWS.