We use analytics cookies.We use cookies to analyze site traffic and improve your experience.
Loading...
System Design Masterclass · Cloud Infrastructure
Free preview: the first 2 parts of this 8-part lesson.
Already bought the course? Sign in to read the whole lesson.
this lesson is part of
System Design Masterclass
Unlock this lesson and the 751 other paid lessons
$25 once, by PayPal
See the System Design courseread the rest of this lesson in
System Design Masterclass
Unlock this lesson and the 751 other paid lessons
$25 once, by PayPal
See the System Design coursein Cloud Infrastructure
This lesson is part of the full System Design Masterclass. Unlock it along with 769 other lessons for a one-time payment.
One-time payment by card or PayPal
Get Lifetime AccessOne-time payment: UPI, card or netbanking
Get Lifetime Access18 Foundation lessons are free, no payment needed. Try them now
It is easy and good
“It is really nice and good Please join the course”
Site-to-site VPN creates an encrypted tunnel through the public internet. It works. But the internet is a shared resource. Bandwidth fluctuates minute to minute, spikes unpredictably during peering congestion, and each VPN tunnel caps at roughly 1.25 Gbps. For a startup running a handful of services in AWS with occasional on-prem database syncs, this is completely fine.
But some workloads need guarantees the internet cannot provide. A financial trading firm running order-matching engines on-prem needs consistent sub-millisecond jitter between their systems and AWS market data feeds. A media production company transfers 50 TB of raw 8K footage to S3 every day, and doing that over a VPN would saturate the tunnel for hours. A hospital network under HIPAA mandates dedicated, auditable connectivity with guaranteed for real-time patient monitoring data.
AWS Direct Connect solves this with a dedicated physical fiber connection between your data center and an AWS region. Your traffic never touches the public internet. Latency is consistent because you are not competing with Netflix streams and YouTube downloads on the same shared links. Bandwidth options go from 50 Mbps (hosted) up to 100 Gbps (dedicated). And data transfer costs drop 40-60% compared to internet-based egress, because AWS charges less for traffic that stays on their backbone.
The trade-off is real: physical setup takes 2-12 weeks depending on whether you already have presence at a Direct Connect location. Monthly port fees start around $200 for hosted connections and climb to $5,000+ for dedicated 10 Gbps ports. You need redundancy planning because a single fiber cut takes down the link. And the connection is NOT encrypted by default.