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There's IPsec, although you are now trading VPC costs with sysadmin overhead costs.

Ovh might be good cheap alternative if you have that need. They have a virtual rack product that's much closer to a VPC.

You can configure the cloud firewall so that only VMs in your account with a certain tag can communicate, even over the internal network.

Public network + firewall feels dirtier than private network, but in reality they are the same thing: a network that’s only accessible to your VMs, to the extent that you trust the provider’s software to enforce that boundary.