If you’re a business that needs to make use of AWS services (or any other major cloud provider) you generally want a direct connection
Take as an example company headquartered in Brisbane. (Keeping things within Australia to simplify) They’ve decided to host a lot of their own servers in a Brisbane data centre, but make extensive use of AWS services and require communication from their servers in Brisbane to AWS. AWS servers are located in Sydney or Melbourne.
They have 3 main ways to get that data communication happening. (Tried to simplify this, there are obviously nuances to all of it) 1). Allow it to all happen over the public internet. Public internet is not guaranteed bandwidth and path. The path with which the data follows is dependent on the internet service provider. It may have to traverse many “hops”, it may change paths, get congested etc. Effectively, you do not have a guarantee of the “quality” of service for the connection. And the AWS costs for data in/out of public internet are more expensive than direct connection.
2). Organise your own dedicated network path to AWS via network service providers. You would lease a dedicated private inter capital network backhaul service to get a connection from your Brisbane data centre to a data centre in Sydney or Melbourne where AWS is located. This is generally sold as a certain speed link (say 1Gbps) between two points on a year lease basis. The bandwidth is yours and yours only (if your network service provider is managing things properly) Problems? You need to know how much bandwidth you require. It’s expensive. It's generally not flexible and you’ll end up paying for more than you need as you can’t turn it up and down. For reliability, you’ll need to purchase redundant/diverse services if one link goes down. You’ll also need to pay for the physical cable “cross-connections” in the data centres at each end, and there may actually be a case that you have to rent data centre space in Syd/Melb to facilitate this. For big companies, particularly tech focussed companies. This may be the path they follow, as they’re in complete control and they have a good understanding of their bandwidth requirements (and have the right type of network engineers on staff)
3) Use a service like Megaport’s SDN cloud connect services. They run their own high bandwidth private network service that interconnects data centres and to cloud service providers. You purchase a port off of them, and tell them where you want to connect to. This gives you a virtual direct connection via their cloud network to the cloud service provider. You can manage the bandwidth - wind it up and down using Megaports portal. They handle the backhaul between the states. You don’t need to worry about the physical connections in Sydney or Melbourne. And you have a “guaranteed” quality of service on the connection with a very direct path (its not traversing public internet). They handle the redundancy/diversity issues. They manage the overall bandwidth requirements for their customers. And you’re paying the lower in/out fees with AWS. You want to expand to using google cloud? Just ask for another port. Have some high bandwidth requirements for a short period for a migration? Wind up the bandwidth for a month. Want to connect to both Sydney and Melbourne AWS services? Ask for another port.
By going with Megaport, you are effectively giving yourself a point of presence in the data centre of your choice around the world, and able to directly connect to the services you require on an Enterprise grade network. With the flexibility to configure/change your connections.Hopefully this makes some sense.
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