Determine your application's networking architecture

Consider your application's requirements and determine how your application should communicate both internally and over the public internet. As part of this, review the range of options available for private and public network connectivity on Akamai Cloud: VPCs, VLANs, private IPv4 addresses, and public IPv4/IPv6 addresses. When choosing VPC for private networking (the most common product), determine if segmenting the VPC into multiple subnets is needed. Consider the number of IP addresses you need now (and might need in the future) per subnet and decide on an acceptable CIDR block as outlined with Valid IPv4 Ranges for Subnets.

Create a VPC

Once you've determined that a VPC is needed, you can create it directly in Cloud Manager using the Create VPC form or by deploying a new Linode and entering a new VPC. During this process, you'll need to define the following parameters:

• Region: The data center where the VPC is deployed. Since VPCs are region-specific, only Linodes within that region can join the VPC.
• Label: A string to identify the VPC. This should be unique to your account.
• Subnet Label: A string to identify the subnet, which should be unique compared to other subnets on the same VPC.
• Subnet CIDR range: The range of IP addresses that can be used by Linodes assigned to this subnet.

While at least 1 subnet must be created, you can create up to 10 subnets per VPC.

Review the Create a VPC guide for complete instructions.

Assign Linodes

You can assign existing Linodes to a VPC or, more commonly, deploy a new Linode to the VPC. For further instructions, review the Assign a Linode to a VPC page.

• New Linode: When creating a Linode, there is an option to add it to an existing VPC. The VPC must already be created in the same data center as selected for the Linode. When assigning a new Linode to a VPC, you must also select the subnet that the Linode should belong to. By default, an IPv4 address from the subnet's CIDR range will be assigned to the Linode, though you can opt to manually enter an IP address. Additionally, public IPv4 connectivity won't be configured by default, though an option is present to configure 1:1 NAT on the VPC interface.

• Existing Linode: If you need to add an existing Linode to a VPC, you can do so from the VPC page or by directly editing that Linode's configuration profile.