At the time of posting this, there is a hard limit of 1000 inbound rules per VPC in AWS that cannot be increased. It is calculated as such:
Inbound or outbound rules per Security Group * Security groups per network interface cannot exceed 1000
So you can have: 5 SGs each with 200 rules, or 6 SGs each with 166 rules, and so on
This poses an issue when you need to allow more than 1000 inbound rules into a VPC.
Alternative way to control inbound traffic is Network ACLs, so you can have up to 200 Network ACLs with 20 Rules per network per VPC but this controls traffic at subnet level rather than instance level, so theoretically it is possible set more inbound rules using ACls.
That said, I am wondering if there are any other common ways to control inbound traffic to EC2 instances that would allow me to whitelist more than a 1000 IPs per VPC?
Thanks