I'm going to walk you through the steps for setting up a AWS Lambda to talk to the internet and a VPC. Let's dive in.

So it might tbe really unintuitive but lambda functions have three states.

1. No VPC, where it can talk openly to the web, but can't talk to any of your AWS services.
2. VPC, the default setting where the lambda function can talk to your AWS services but can't talk to the web.
3. VPC with NAT, The best of both worlds, AWS services and web.

I'm gonna walk you through the steps to set up number 3.

VPC Dashboard > Subnets

This is what I had to start with, my existing vpc that I wanted to connect to already had 4 subnets. Here I noticed I had a couple of subnets already set up. Below is a totally fake ip I pulled from the internet. But the patten of increments of 16 is recreated here.

Note: DO NOT use 131.179.0.0/16 as your number use your vpc local ip and substitute the pattern.

Here I created three four new subnets.

Note: Here igw stands for Internet Gateway and nat stands for network address translation gateway (NAT Gateway).

Three of them will point to the nat and one points to the igw.

Let's create the Route Tables now.

VPC Dashboard > Route Tables

Your going to want to set up two Route Tables.

One that points to your nat let's call this lambda-rt-to-nat:

One that points to your igw let's call this lambda-rt-to-igw:

Your gonna want to go into each of the subnet and assign them to their corresponding route table.