Where Do Your AWS Network Rules Actually Live?

After spending years climbing into server racks, cabling switches, and staring at Cisco IOS prompts, the first time I opened the AWS console felt oddly disorienting. Everything I knew was still there — subnets, routing tables, firewall rules — but the physical devices had completely vanished. No chassis to open. No cable to trace. Just a browser tab. So I went digging. And what I found changed how I think about networking entirely. AWS did not reinvent networking. It took every concept we alread