How To Set Up Direct Connect?
The following are steps to be followed to set up a Direct Connect connection to your on-premises network or data center:
- Choose an AWS Direct Connect location closest to your premises or network, you can search for the available location of the AWS Direct Connect portal/website.
- Once you have chosen the location, from the AWS Direct Connect Partners page, you have to select a network service provider that provides connection from your on-premises infrastructure to the AWS Direct Connect location, while choosing a delivery partner keep in mind the bandwidth, location, and other network requirement.
- Provision a dedicated network connection from your on-premises infrastructure to the selected partner’s location, a dedicated network means a physical connection.
- After the physical connection setup, some virtual configurations need to be done.
AWS Management Console -> Direct Connect -> Create virtual interface
- Log in to the AWS Management Console.
- Go to the Direct Connect section
- Create a virtual interface by providing the VLAN ID, routing, and other required details.
After configuring the virtual interface, you can now access the various AWS services such as creating VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), storage and many more.
What is Direct Connect in AWS?
Most of the modern IT infrastructure use hybrid application that is deployed along multiple cloud platforms or multiple locations. The typical connection between that environment travels through VPN Tunnel over the public internet. Thus a connection might suffer in case of unpredictable internet connection, latency, or loss of private customers’ data. So a dedicated connection is needed between data centers and offices.
Here comes the Direct Connect in the picture, networking services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a dedicated network connection over standard Ethernet fiber-optic cable between your data center (on-premises data center) and AWS Direct connect location that completely bypasses the public networks coming in between.