Connection Types
- Dedicated: 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, or 100 Gbps physical port at DX location
- Hosted: sub-1G (50M–500M) or 1/2/5/10G via partner, shared port
- Lead time: dedicated ~weeks/months; hosted ~days
- LOA-CFA (Letter of Authorization) to authorize cross-connect
Virtual Interfaces
- Private VIF: access VPC resources via Virtual Private Gateway or DX Gateway
- Public VIF: access all AWS public endpoints (S3, DynamoDB, etc.)
- Transit VIF: access VPCs via Transit Gateway through DX Gateway
- Each VIF uses a VLAN tag and BGP session (ASN required)
Direct Connect Gateway
- Global resource — connect DX to VPCs in any region
- Associates with Virtual Private Gateways or Transit Gateways
- Max 10 VGW associations or 3 TGW associations per DX Gateway
- Does not enable VPC-to-VPC routing (only on-prem to VPC)
Redundancy & Failover
- Maximum resiliency: separate connections at separate DX locations
- High resiliency: 2 connections at 2 DX locations
- Single connection not SLA-eligible — always deploy redundancy
- VPN as backup: lower cost failover with higher latency
Practice Direct Connect Questions
Put your knowledge to the test with practice questions.