What Is Direct Connect?

Why Direct Connect?

• Network quality: Direct Connect allows you to establish a dedicated network for data transmission, which brings high network performance, low latency, and excellent user experience.
• Security: Direct Connect establishes private connectivity between your on-premises data center and the cloud. Data is transmitted over a secure dedicated connection.
• Transmission speed: A single connection supports up to 100 Gbit/s of bandwidth.

Components

The key components of Direct Connect are a connection, virtual gateway, and virtual interface.

• Connection

  A dedicated network connection is established between your on-premises data center and a Direct Connect location over a line you leased from a carrier. You can create a standard connection by yourself or request a hosted connection from a partner. After you are certified as a partner, you can also create an operations connection.

  A standard or operations connection has a dedicated port for your exclusive use and can be associated with multiple virtual interfaces.

  A hosted connection allows you to share a port. Partners with operations connections can provision hosted connections and allocate VLANs and bandwidths for those connections. You can request hosted connections from these partners, and only one virtual interface can be created for a hosted connection.

• Virtual gateway

  A virtual gateway is a logical gateway for accessing VPCs. A virtual gateway can be associated with only one VPC, and multiple connections can use the same virtual gateway to access one VPC.

• Global DC gateway

  A global DC gateway enables your on-premises data center to access VPCs in multiple regions so you can use a single connection to provide high-speed access to cloud compute and storage resources in any region.

  A global DC gateway can only be associated with connections terminated at the same Direct Connect location. If there are multiple connections terminated at different Direct Connect location, you need to create multiple global DC gateways.

• Virtual interface

  A virtual interface links a connection with one or more virtual gateways, each of which is associated with a VPC, so that your on-premises network can access all these VPCs.

Accessing Direct Connect

The public cloud provides a web-based user interface, the management console, for you to access the Direct Connect service.

• If you already have an account, log in to the management console and choose Networking > Direct Connect on the homepage.
• If you do not have an account, you can sign up for one by referring to Getting Started.