Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers customers the ability to achieve highly available network connections between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) and their on-premises infrastructure. This capability extends customer access to AWS resources in a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective way. While many customers are able to quickly determine the type of connections they want to establish (either VPN or AWS Direct Connect), they often struggle with understanding how to make these connections highly available and how to best leverage redundant connections. This webpage provides AWS customers with best practices, recommendations, and common configurations to help build highly available, efficient connections between AWS and a single remote data center. When possible, AWS recommends connecting from multiple data centers in order to add physical-location redundancy, in addition to hardware redundancy; however, we realize this might not be practical for all customers. For information about creating highly available network connections from multiple locations, please see

The following sections are applicable to customers who have already determined the appropriate remote connectivity option for their use case (see the AWS Network Connectivity Options whitepaper for more information), and assume basic knowledge of Amazon VPC, Virtual Private Network connections, AWS Direct Connect, connecting and routing between remote networks, and dynamic routing protocols.