AWS Direct Connect - What is it and how it works?

Author

Govardhana M K
September 27, 2025

In partnership with

TechOps Examples

Hey — It's Govardhana MK 👋

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

AWS Direct Connect - What is it and how it works?

Enterprises running hybrid cloud setups often hit the same wall. Moving large volumes of data or latency sensitive workloads over the public internet becomes unpredictable, insecure, and costly. VPNs over the internet help, but they still suffer from jitter, packet drops, and bandwidth ceilings that impact mission critical applications. AWS Direct Connect solves this problem.

What is AWS Direct Connect ?

It is a dedicated network connection between your data center or colocation facility and AWS. Instead of routing through the internet, you establish a private link that delivers consistent bandwidth, lower latency, and improved security.

The key terms you must know

Private Virtual Interface (Private VIF)
A logical connection that lets you reach your VPC directly using private IP addressing. This is used to connect to EC2 instances, RDS databases, or other VPC resources.

Public Virtual Interface (Public VIF)
A logical connection to reach AWS public services such as S3, DynamoDB, or CloudFront. It provides private access to AWS public endpoints without passing through the internet.

Virtual Private Gateway (VPG)
The component on the AWS side that anchors your Private VIF, enabling communication between your data center and your VPC.

Direct Connect Gateway (DX Gateway)
A global resource that allows you to connect from one Direct Connect to VPCs across multiple AWS regions. It simplifies large hybrid deployments.

Customer Router or On Prem Router
The networking device in your data center that terminates the Direct Connect link and manages routing.

Colocation Facility or AWS Direct Connect Location
The physical site where AWS provides the Direct Connect endpoint and where your service provider or your equipment establishes the connection.

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Organizations use it for disaster recovery, financial transaction systems, large scale analytics, or to avoid high egress charges from constant data transfer.

Direct Connect Gateway Application

Real world deployments rarely stop at one Region. Enterprises often need connectivity to multiple VPCs across different Regions within the same AWS account. Without an additional layer, you would have to create multiple Direct Connect links for each Region, which is costly and complex.

Direct Connect Gateway acts as a central hub. You establish one Direct Connect connection and one private virtual interface, then attach the Direct Connect Gateway to virtual private gateways in multiple Regions.

This design lets you extend a single Direct Connect across Regions, simplify routing, and reduce operational overhead.

In short, if your requirement is Direct Connect to multiple VPCs in different Regions, you must use a Direct Connect Gateway.

With this basic understanding, let us look at the architecture designs for high resilience in critical workloads.

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