Amazon Direct Connect Resiliency Recommendations

Amazon Web Services  offers customers the ability to achieve highly resilient network connections between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and their on-premises infrastructure. This capability extends customer access to Amazon Web Services resources in a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective way. This page documents our best practices for ensuring high resiliency with Amazon Direct Connect.

Highly resilient, fault-tolerant network connections are key to a well-architected system. Amazon Web Services recommends connecting from multiple data centers for physical location redundancy. When designing remote connections, consider using redundant hardware and telecommunications providers. Additionally, it is a best practice to use dynamically routed, active/active connections for automatic load balancing and failover across redundant network connections. Provision sufficient network capacity to ensure that the failure of one network connection does not overwhelm and degrade redundant connections.

Amazon Direct Connect Partners help customers establish network connectivity between Amazon Direct Connect locations and their data centers, offices or colocation environments. When selecting Amazon Direct Connect Partners, consider a dual-vendor approach, if financially feasible, to ensure private-network diversity. When planning your connectivity, work with your selected Partner(s) to determine which of the above best practices are right for your needs, and learn how your selected Partner(s) can enable you to achieve them.

Amazon Web Services recommends customers use multiple dynamically routed, rather than statically routed, connections to Amazon Web Services at multiple Amazon Direct Connect locations. This will allow remote connections to fail over automatically. Dynamic routing also enables remote connections to automatically leverage available preferred routes, if applicable, to the on-premises network. Highly resilient connections require redundant hardware, even when connecting from the same physical location. Avoid relying on a single on-premises device connecting to a single Amazon Direct Connect device.