You can host a basic web application, such as a blog or simple website in a VPC, and gain the additional layers of privacy and security afforded by Amazon VPC. You can help secure the website by creating security group rules which allow the webserver to respond to inbound HTTP and SSL requests from the Internet while simultaneously prohibiting the webserver from initiating outbound connections to the Internet. You can create a VPC that supports this use case by selecting "VPC with a Single Public Subnet Only" from the Amazon VPC console wizard.

You can use Amazon VPC to host multi-tier web applications and strictly enforce access and security restrictions between your webservers, application servers, and databases. You can launch webservers in a publicly accessible subnet and application servers and databases in non-publically accessible subnets. The application servers and databases can’t be directly accessed from the Internet, but they can still access the Internet via a NAT gateway to download patches, for example. You can control access between the servers and subnets using inbound and outbound packet filtering provided by network access control lists and security groups. To create a VPC that supports this use case, you can select "VPC with Public and Private Subnets" in the Amazon VPC console wizard.

You can create a VPC where instances in one subnet, such as web servers, communicate with the Internet while instances in another subnet, such as application servers, communicate with databases on your corporate network. An IPsec VPN connection between your VPC and your corporate network helps secure all communication between the application servers in the cloud and databases in your data center. Web servers and application servers in your VPC can leverage Amazon EC2 elasticity and Auto Scaling features to grow and shrink as needed. You can create a VPC to support this use case by selecting "VPC with Public and Private Subnets and Hardware VPN Access" in the Amazon VPC console wizard.

You can move corporate applications to the cloud, launch additional web servers, or add more compute capacity to your network by connecting your VPC to your corporate network. Because your VPC can be hosted behind your corporate firewall, you can seamlessly move your IT resources into the cloud without changing how your users access these applications. You can select "VPC with a Private Subnet Only and Hardware VPN Access" from the Amazon VPC console wizard to create a VPC that supports this use case.

You can periodically backup your mission critical data from your datacenter to a small number of Amazon EC2 instances with Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, or import your virtual machine images to Amazon EC2. In the event of a disaster in your own datacenter, you can quickly launch replacement compute capacity in AWS to ensure business continuity. When the disaster is over, you can send your mission critical data back to your datacenter and terminate the Amazon EC2 instances that you no longer need. By using Amazon VPC for disaster recovery, you can have all the benefits of a disaster recovery site at a fraction of the normal cost.