AWS NZ Internet Pipe & Direct Connect Info

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/new-zealand-internet-connectivity-to-aws/

AWS (a kiwi amazonian no less: well done Cameron!) on the 8th of Oct posted the above blog post about how my country connects to AWS.

This is a great post explaining the landscape and connectivity challenges and options we face here in Aoteoroa.

However, I would like to jump on a point raised regarding Direct Connect as it may be little mis-leading from what I understand (happy to be corrected).

“Customers may publish their own 802.11q Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN) tags across the DX, and advertise routes via Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). A dedicated connection supports up to 50 private or public virtual interfaces. New Zealand does not have a physical point-of-presence for DX—users must procure connectivity to our Sydney Region. Many AWS Partner Network (APN) members in New Zealand offer this connectivity.“

For customers who don’t want or need to manage VLANs to AWS—or prefer 1 Gbps or smaller links —APN partners offer hosted connections or hosted virtual interfaces.  For more detail, please review our AWS Direct Connect Partners page.

It has been my experience the ONLY way we can connect to AWS is via the Hosted method.

Fortunately for us AWS have also released Direct Connect Gateway and Transit Gateway which, when couple with a network hub account allows Kiwi’s to consolidate links in a centralised, cost effective manner and mitigates this issue.

The AWS Direct Connect documentation does not cover hosted connections very well (or at least historically hasn’t). So it can be very confusing when trying to set these up for us kiwi’s. Fortunately a few of the ISPs and partners are now getting used to this.

Shameless plug for my fav software defined networking vendor Megaport. Catch up on their cloud router updates from my post here