AWS Direct Connect Comes to Singapore

AWS Direct Connect (also called Peering) is a capability that connects on-premise infrastructure to AWS through a dedicated connection. This provides AWS customers with additional privacy and decreased latencies. It also saves bandwidth cost since the data transfer happens through a private network. One of the biggest advantages of Direct Connect is that the enterprises can treat AWS Cloud as an extended data center. Amazon initially announced this feature in August 2011 for US-East (Virginia) Region and now extended that across all the available AWS Regions except Brazil and Oregon which are recent additions.

Typical use cases of AWS Direct Connect include the following –

High-volume data transfer: AWS Direct Connect provides a more cost-effective and secure means to move large amounts of data in and out of AWS in a way that opens up possibilities to deploy new applications.

Hybrid environments: You now have a better alternative to extend your infrastructure into the cloud, combining the elasticity and economic benefits of AWS with the ability to use your infrastructure in Equinix data centers. AWS Direct Connect allows you to establish an isolated and controlled network space in Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) to extend your current data center environment into the cloud using the same IP addressing scheme, as if the cloud was in your data center.

Enhance performance: AWS Direct Connect allows you to control how your data is routed by bypassing the public Internet. Applications that require predictable network performance or where you need to deliver a more consistent network experience will benefit. You can now treat instances as part of the data center LAN and integrate a cloud strategy into more applications.

Concurrent access to public and private resources: AWS Direct Connect can be partitioned into multiple logical connections, enabling 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 EC2 instances running within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) using private IP space.

Direct storage connectivity: Private, secure, high-throughput access to AWS allows for more regular migration or replication of your data from AWS into customer-managed storage solutions. AWS Direct Connect can help you improve upon business continuity policies, disaster recovery processes, and data retention strategies.

For the Singapore Region, Amazon has partnered with Equinix for Direct Connect. Existing Equinix customers can “touch” the AWS Cloud directly without relying on a 3rd party or public connectivity options.

What does this mean to AWS India customers? Equinix’s Singapore facility is the only hub that can connect us to AWS Singapore Region. Reliance Globalcom, a divison Reliance Communications has earlier tied up with Equinix to extend their point of presence across South Asia. However, neither Equinix nor Reliance explicitly announced the options for India. But based on the existing partnership, Reliance Communications may be the only provider that can offer AWS Direct Connect to Indian customers.

- Janakiram MSV, Chief Editor, CloudStory.in