A Private Wire To The Cloud
A direct connect is a dedicated physical link between your data center and the cloud provider, bypassing the public internet. It offers more consistent latency and bandwidth than an internet path, which suits steady high volume traffic.
Routing With BGP
Dedicated links exchange routes dynamically using the border gateway protocol.
- BGP is the protocol that advertises which address ranges are reachable over the link.
- Each side announces its prefixes, so routers learn paths automatically.
- If the link fails, BGP can withdraw routes and shift to a backup path.
Why Not Just The Internet
A direct connect gives predictable performance and can lower egress cost for large transfers, but a single line is a single point of failure. Robust designs use two links or pair a direct connect with a backup VPN, letting BGP steer traffic to whichever path is healthy.
Key idea
A direct connect is a dedicated private link to the cloud with predictable performance, and BGP dynamically advertises and withdraws routes so traffic can fail over to a backup path when a link goes down.