AWS VPC Lattice: The Missing Service Layer Between VPC Connectivity and Application Routing
AWS VPC Lattice: The Missing Service Layer Between VPC Connectivity and Application Routing AWS VPC Lattice is easiest to misunderstand when you treat it like another load balancer. The real value is a service-layer boundary for discovery, auth, routing, and observability across VPCs, accounts, and even on-prem entry paths. TL;DR AWS VPC Lattice is most useful when your problem is not raw network connectivity but service-to-service access control and routing across many boundaries. It gives you a service network abstraction, per-service listeners and target groups, IAM-backed auth policies, and request-level observability without forcing every team to hand-build PrivateLink, Route 53, and load balancer patterns from scratch. The important caveat is that it does not replace your VPC underlay, and some protocol choices, especially TLS passthrough, gRPC, and health checks, carry sharp constraints that you need to design for early. VPC Lattice works best when you treat it as a service a...