imbriaco

We make use of Direct Connect and love it. I need to preface the rest of this by saying that our datacenter is located within a few miles of Amazon's us-east-1 region, so the latency for Direct Connect between our router and theirs is on the order of 1-2ms. If we were further away, I may lean toward using a VPN solution rather than Direct Connect, depending on the bandwidth needs.

There are two different use cases, both of which we find handy:

1. Building VPCs as a logical extension of our network, with very low latency. We make extensive use of this for temporary capacity and elastic workloads and love it. It allows us to treat EC2 instances in nearly the same way as we treat physical hosts in our infrastructure and without a significant latency difference.

2. Public peering with AWS. We have a significant amount of traffic to our sites that originates from other people's EC2 instances. We also make pretty heavy use of S3. Since we have a BGP session that gets all AWS public address space, we're able to route both types of traffic over our Direct Connect circuits rather than using our public internet transit circuits. This also works great for us.

We have 2 x 10Gbps circuits and the only up-front cost was to have the cross-connects installed by Equinix. We pay monthly for those cross-connects as well, and Amazon publishes the rest of the pricing. We're working directly with Amazon and not through a partner since we're able to cross-connect within the Equinix campus.