AWS Direct Connect

AWS Direct Connect Video

AWS Direct Connect enables you to establish a dedicated network connection from your on-premise data center to your environment. This service:

  • Reduces network costs
  • Increases bandwidth through-put
  • Reduces latency
  • Increases security
  • Provides a more consistent network experience than Internet or IP-VPN connections.

Connect to AWS

  1. In the AWS Management Console, copy your account ID by clicking your user name in the top right to display your account ID. go to Support, select Support Center, and find your Account number.

    See also AWS Account ID.

  2. Sign in to Equinix Fabric.

  3. From Connections, select Create Connection.

  4. In the A Service Provider card, click Connect to a Service Provider.

  5. Enter AWS in the search field.

  6. Select AWS, then click Create Connection.

  7. Review the steps for connecting to AWS and click Create a Connection to AWS Direct Connect.

  8. Choose the Origin Metro, Destination Port, and the Equinix Fabric Port.

  9. Enter the connection name, VLAN ID and AWS account number, then choose the connection speed.

  10. Review your information, including email addresses, then click Submit your order.

    The Success message appears and you are sent a confirmation email. Another email arrives letting you know the order is provisioned.

    You can confirm the connection status from the Connections Inventory page.

  11. Go back to the AWS Console, and accept Direct Connect Hosted Connection.

  12. Click Connections, then expand the connection.
  13. Select the charges confirmation checkbox, then click Accept Connection.

Equinix supports the two recommended product types for AWS Direct Connect:

  • Dedicated Connections – Available as a dedicated port and cross connect into the AWS network with bandwidth capability of 1 and 10 Gbps

  • Hosted Connections – Available through Equinix Fabric with the following bandwidth options: 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, 200 Mbps, 300 Mbps, 400 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 2 Gbps, 5 Gbps, or 10 Gbps

Note: AWS recommends customers with workloads sensitive to network congestion use Dedicated Connections or Hosted Connections.

Virtual Interface (VIF) is the mechanism for configuring VLAN’s and routing (BGP) between the customer edge device and the AWS device. There are two kinds of VIFs: Public and Private.

For more information, see AWS DX Virtual Interfaces.

Equinix and Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers customers the ability to achieve highly resilient network connections between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and their on-premises infrastructure.

To configure redundancy, a second Direct Connect link must be created by repeating the same steps described above. Redundancy should be created over a second port into the Equinix Fabric (although not required, as redundant Virtual Circuits can be created over the same physical port).

Different configuration choices are available when you provision two dedicated connections:

  • Active and Active (BGP multipath) – Network traffic is load balanced across both connections. If one connection becomes unavailable, all traffic is routed through the other. This is the default configuration.
  • Active and Passive (failover) – In this configuration, one connection is handling traffic, and the other is on standby. If the active connection becomes unavailable, all traffic is routed through the passive connection.

Note: Your choice of configuration affects the policies that determine how your data is routed over both connections.

To achieve high availability with AWS Direct Connect, each Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) should be configured with connections to multiple Direct Connect locations.

For more information on configuration, see AWS Direct Connect Resiliency Recommendations.

To configure the Z-side, following parameters are required:

  • A new VLAN tag

  • A public or private BGP ASN – If you are using a public ASN, you must own it. If you are using a private ASN, it must be in the 65000 range

  • The network prefixes to advertise – Any advertised prefix must include only your ASN in the BGP AS-PATH

  • The virtual private gateway for connection

    For more information about creating a virtual private gateway, see adding a hardware virtual private gateway to your VPC in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

Under Define Your New Private Virtual Interface, do the following:

  1. In the Interface Name field, enter a name for the virtual interface.

  2. In Interface Owner, select the My AWS Account option if the virtual interface is for your AWS account ID.

  3. In the VGW list, select the virtual gateway to connect to.

  4. The VLAN # field will already be filled in and grayed out.

  5. To have AWS generate your router IP address and Amazon IP address, select Auto-generate peer IPs.

  6. To specify these IP addresses, de-select the Auto-generate peer IPs option, and then in the Your router peer IP field, enter the destination IPv4 CIDR address that Amazon should send traffic to. In the Amazon router peer IP field, enter the IPv4 CIDR address you will use to send traffic to Amazon Web Services.

  7. In the BGP ASN field, enter the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Autonomous System Number (ASN) of your gateway; for example, a number between 1 and 65534.

  8. Select Auto-generate BGP key to have AWS generate one.

  9. To provide your own BGP key, de-select Auto-generate BGP key, and then in the BGP Authorization Key field, enter your BGP MD5 key.

    Note: Public VIFs are also supported on Equinix Fabric.

  10. View the Router (BGP) Configuration.

    In the Virtual Interfaces pane, select a virtual interface, then click the arrow to show more details.

This varies on the vendor of the customer device (such as Cisco or Juniper).

  1. Configure physical port with appropriate protocols and tagging.

  2. Configure logical ports (sub-interfaces) with appropriate IP addresses and VLAN tags.

  3. Configure BGP peering.

    • Configure physical port with appropriate protocols and tagging

    • Configure logical ports (sub-interfaces) with appropriate IP addresses and VLAN tags

    • Configure BGP Peering