Enable VPC internet access using internet gateways

An internet gateway is a horizontally scaled, redundant, and highly available VPC component that allows communication between your VPC and the internet. It supports IPv4 and IPv6 traffic. It does not cause availability risks or bandwidth constraints on your network traffic.

An internet gateway enables resources in your public subnets (such as EC2 instances) to connect to the internet if the resource has a public IPv4 address or an IPv6 address. Similarly, resources on the internet can initiate a connection to resources in your subnet using the public IPv4 address or IPv6 address. For example, an internet gateway enables you to connect to an EC2 instance in AWS using your local computer.

An internet gateway provides a target in your VPC route tables for internet-routable traffic. For communication using IPv4, the internet gateway also performs network address translation (NAT). For communication using IPv6, NAT is not needed because IPv6 addresses are public. For more information, see IP addresses and NAT.