Express Connect establishes reliable, secure, and high-speed private connections between your on-premises data center and a virtual private cloud (VPC). Use Express Connect to enable communication between networks with different architectures. The following scenarios describe three network architectures organized by availability and scale requirements — from the most resilient to the simplest.
Choose a scenario
| Scenario | Business type | Protects against | Connection type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disaster recovery and high availability | Medium and large enterprises with mission-critical workloads | Fiber cuts, device failures, and complete access point failures | Dedicated or shared circuit |
| High elasticity and high availability | Large enterprises with fast-growing traffic | Device, leased line, and access point failures at Tbps scale | Dedicated connection (ECMP) |
| Simplified connectivity | Non-critical services such as development and testing | Device failures (limited) | Dedicated or hosted connection |
Disaster recovery and high availability
Best for: Mission-critical workloads that require the highest level of resilience across multiple failure types.
Establish dedicated Express Connect circuits at multiple access points. This topology independently protects against fiber optic cable cuts, equipment malfunctions, and complete access point failures.
Use a dedicated circuit or shared circuit to implement this architecture.
High elasticity and high availability
Best for: Large enterprises whose traffic growth outpaces on-premises data center capacity and who need terabit-scale bandwidth.
Deploy services in the cloud and use Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) to elastically scale dedicated connection bandwidth to terabit-per-second (Tbps) levels. This topology prevents service downtime caused by device, leased line, and access point malfunctions.
Simplified connectivity
Best for: Non-critical workloads such as development and testing environments that do not require high elasticity or high availability.
Use Express Connect to establish a private connection between your on-premises data center and your VPC. This topology provides secure, reliable communication between on-premises and cloud environments.
Use a dedicated connection or hosted connection in this scenario.
