What is AWS Direct Connect?

AWS DIRECT CONNECT ENABLES YOU TO CONNECT YOUR IT INFRASTRUCTURE DIRECTLY TO AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS)

Amazon Web Services® Direct Connect allows you to institute a dedicated connection between your network and one of the AWS Direct Connect locations available in Core Site data centers. From there, CoreSite’s access to AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a high-capacity, secure connection to the entire suite of AWS cloud services. By utilizing AWS Direct

Connect in a CoreSite data center, you can increase the performance, reliability and security of your AWS applications and workloads.

Use AWS Direct Connect at a Core Site Data Center to:

• Transfer large amounts of data to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) with guaranteed network performance

• Reduce your TCO by taking advantage of reduced data transfer rates into the AWS cloud

• Access the entire collection of elastic AWS services, including S3, EBS, RedShift, Glacier and others

BENEFITS TO YOU

• Secure, reliable connectivity to your Amazon VPC

• Consistent network performance

• Ultra-low latency

• Reduced bandwidth costs

AWS Direct Connect services are currently offered in four major U.S. markets – Los Angeles, Silicon Valley,

New York and Northern Virginia. CoreSite also offers on-demand connectivity to AWS via the CoreSite Open

Cloud Exchange in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, New York, Northern Virginia and Boston. This provides an

easy way to take advantage of the benefits of using AWS Direct Connect to enable dedicated, high-capacity

connections to your Amazon VPC.

Note: Below diagram reflects a AWS infrastructure where there are 3 EC2 running in each zone configured with the load balancer and further connected to a gateway.

The above diagram shows how the AWS infrastructure is connected to the Hc2 infrastructure using the AWS direct connect that is made available to our partners.

Using AWS Direct Connect, one can establish private connectivity between AWS and our datacenter(Coresite in our case)

which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections.

AWS Direct Connect lets you establish a dedicated network connection between AWS network and our datacenter. Using industry standard 802.1q VLANs, this dedicated connection can be partitioned into multiple virtual interfaces.

This allows you to use the same connection to access public resources such as objects stored in Amazon S3 using public IP address space, and private resources such as Amazon EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using private IP space, while maintaining network separation between the public and private environments.

AWS Direct Connect provides 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps connections, and you can easily provision multiple connections if you need more capacity. You can also use AWS Direct Connect instead of establishing a VPN connection over the Internet to your Amazon VPC, avoiding the need to utilize VPN hardware that frequently can’t support data transfer rates above 4 Gbps.

AWS Environment

Below are the steps that will be involved while configuring and requesting the Direct connect Service from AWS

Step 1: Sign Up for Amazon Web Services

Step 2: Submit AWS Direct Connect Connection Request

Step 3: Download the LOA-CFA and Request a Cross Connect from Your Network Provider (optional)

Step 4: Configure Redundant Connections with AWS Direct Connect

Step 5: Create a Virtual Interface

Step 6: Download Router Configuration.

Step 7: Verify Your Virtual Interface

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Reference Links

Direct Connect