- Alright, now let's talk about AWS Direct Connect.
Direct Connect is a way of getting direct access
into an AWS region over private networking.
In many situations we have the need for
on-premise applications or data
to get to and from Amazon Web Services region
without going over the open internet.
Maybe we need greater bandwidth and better performance
and we can get that with the Direct Connect.
Direct Connect comes in two options,
being a one gig or a 10 gigabit per second connection.
We can have one Direct Connect connection
terminate into one or multiple VPCs.
Now in order to establish this connection,
we would provide our LOA-CFA
to whatever vendor is local to us.
In many cases, that might be AT&T, Level 3, Equinix,
the list goes on.
There's a number of providers.
It just depends on where you are in the country
or around the world.
Another great benefit besides the increased bandwidth,
the consistent network performance,
is that we should keep in mind that data transfer
out of AWS, whether it's data leaving a load balancer,
it's data leaving Simple Storage Service,
or leaving DynamoDB, we pay for all outgoing bandwidth,
and so if we have bandwidth coming out of S3
and going back to our corporate network
or out co-location facility,
we could see a lower data transfer rate
by using Direct Connect.
So in this example we're seeing
our corporate data center,
this could be our on-premise network at our headquarters,
this could be our data center or a co-location,
and we have a Direct Connect,
and this particular Direct Connect
we would divide into multiple VLANs
where each VLAN terminates into
a separate virtual gateway attached to a VPC.
So we're leveraging one Direct Connect
to gain access to multiple VPCs.
So again, Direct Connect is a really great way
to achieve a private, dedicated connection
directly into an AWS region.