Active/Active and Active/Passive Configurations in AWS Direct Connect Architecture Diagrams
Active/Active and Active/Passive Configurations in AWS
Direct Connect
Publication date: September 21, 2023 (Diagram history)
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
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. The
AWS Direct Connect Resiliency Toolkit provides a connection wizard with multiple resiliency
models. These models help you to determine and then place an order for the number of dedicated
connections to achieve your SLA objective.
This reference architecture focuses on the Maximum Resiliency model, which provides you with a
way to order dedicated connections to achieve an SLA of 99.99%. You can find the requirements in
the AWS Direct Connect Service Level Agreement.
Link aggregation groups (LAGs) and Equal Cost Multi Path (ECMP)
For Active/Active mode, you can leverage LAGs for dedicated AWS Direct Connect connections,
terminating on the same AWS Direct Connect endpoint. This will load balance traffic across all
connections in the LAG on layer 2. This will not protect against failure on the AWS Direct Connect
endpoint or the whole AWS Direct Connect location.
With ECMP, you can load balance traffic across multiple connections and AWS Direct Connect
locations on layer 3. You can influence path behaviour by longest prefix match and Border Gateway
Protocol (BGP) attributes. This allows for setting up Active/Active or Active/Passive configurations.
Active/Active with Private/Transit VIF Diagram
Build Active/Active configuration with Transit/Private Virtual Interface (VIF) for max resiliency.
Have redundant AWS Direct Connect connections inside each AWS Direct Connect location as well
as across locations, customer data centers, and devices. This configuration offers customers max
resilience to failure. Such a topology ensures resilience to connectivity failure due to a fiber cut or a
device failure as well as a complete location failure.
• Transit/Private VIF: You can create Active/Active by ensuring advertised prefixes, local
preference, autonomous system (AS) path, and Multi-Exit Discriminator (MED) values are the
Active/Active with Private/Transit VIF Diagram 1