What is Destination and Target in Route table (AWS VPC)?

Question

What is Destination and Target in Route table? I can see Destination and target can be configured to Internet gateway, is there any other use case ?

Domination

Answer 1

A short answer:

Destination: the packet's final destination

Target: where the packet should go next, to get it one step closer to the intended destination.

e.g.

You are planning a business trip from the US to Paris.

• Destination: Paris
• Target: US airport, fly to Paris.

Messene

Best example to void confusion. – Mowry

Answer 2

Each route has a destination and target field.

• Destination field specifies the pattern that a request must match with its destination address (IP or CIDR range).
• Target field specifies where such a request should be routed. It could be local (i.e. to targets in this VPC) or your-internet-gateway-ID in case those requests should be routed to the gateway for external/somewhere-else access. A list of possible target values is here.

Here's an example assuming a VPC with addresses 10.0.0.0/16

| Destination | Target      |
|:------------|------------:|
| 10.0.0.0/16 | local       |
|  0.0.0.0/0  | your-igw-id |

This will route any request with into-the-VPC destination to local targets in the VPC. If the pattern 10.0.0.0/16 is not met, the any-ipv4-address aka 0.0.0.0/0 will be considered and the request will be routed to the internet gateway you specified with ID your-igw-id.

The order of the routes is irrelevant since the most specific route will be chosen.

Ales

does it correspond to outgoing traffic only? I mean if an instance in my VPC subnet tries to access an IP different from 10.0.0.0/16 mask than it will be routed to internat gateway? So if incoming traffic from the internet is coming to Internet Gateway, it will be able to access any instances in my VPC subnets? – Laggard

Routes and access privileges are two different things. I would use network-level ACLs to control access to the VPC. – Ales

Thanks Marco, you are right - found similar answer here - acloud.guru/forums/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate/… – Laggard

Answer 3

Destination => IP address/CIDR range .
Target => Where you want to send the traffic for the specified destination (e.g. if the destination is my local subnet, mention target as "local")

The Internet gateway is one of the targets (e.g. routing traffic to the internet). Other options for the target would be

• NAT Gateway
• Virtual Private Gateway
• VPC endpoint
• VPC peering connection etc. depending on your architecture

Route table document explains it well.

Whore

I feel like there should be a newline between the first word of "range" and the first word of "Target" – Rizzio

Answer 4

This is easy to comprehend, for any entry in a Route Table there are the following 2 parts:

1. Destination - This is an IP Address or a CIDR Range. To plan this out, consider outgoing traffic from any instance inside a VPC. This outgoing traffic will have some destination IP Address, and the route will just handle the request to the target, which is the second part of the entry.
2. Target - Target is just the destination the request will be redirected to for getting processed.

Example: Destination: 0.0.0.0 and Target: Internet Gateway - Here all traffic will be passed on to the Internet Gateway

Calamander

Answer 5

This is how I understand?

destination : Final target or Goal
target : Immediate target to achieve final target(via)

Ex:

destination can be Orthopedic Doctor

target can be MBBS, which a College student can take(via) to reach his final target or destination i.e his/her final goal, Orthopedic specialization.

Dardan

Answer 6

destination is just destination.

target is next hop, but different from on premises, next hop don't use IP address but identifier

Spot