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Back in 2022, my at-the-time workplace decided to sponsor folks for AWS certifications. To get people to start studying for the test, they asked that folks pick one of the many services or configurations you can/might/will end up using on AWS and do a 1-hour group discussion on it.

"Group discussion" here was implied. We were asked to make presentations. And so people did. For whatever reason, despite not being as eager to get that certification as other folks had been, I was asked to "present" a "session" on VPCs, which threw me for a minute. Because who cares about VPCs?

I was wrong, of course. It was a bit of fun to do the reading on VPCs and then CIDR blocks and the general principles of designing and building networks — all very interesting stuff, a rabbit hole leading down into a veritable warren of topics that I wish I'd taken better notes on. But anyway.

Which took all of 30 minutes, with the rest remaining for questions and activities. With the number of folks who'd already done presentations in the weeks prior, I wanted to keep things lively. Silly questions and hypotheticals welcome. Like, what if we want an EC2 instance to have 2 IP addresses?

And for the most part, I got what I wanted. It was a good session! CIDR blocks and the Classful model of networking alone alone wrinkled a few brains during that session. However, there's always folks who miss the point of group discussions. And there were a few around that day too.

At the end of my slideshow, before starting the broader discussion with the dumb hypotheticals and so on, I'd asked the group at large, "What even is a VPC?" — informally, almost jokingly, in an effort to put everyone at ease. I saw a couple of colleagues start typing. Likely into Google search.