The Capital Area Advanced Research and Education Network (CAAREN) has signed up with Equinix Cloud Exchange to offer ExpressRoute and AWS Direct Connect.
Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute lets customer extend on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a dedicated private connection facilitated by a connectivity provider. With ExpressRoute, customer can establish connections to Microsoft cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, Office 365, and CRM Online. Connectivity can be from point-to-point Ethernet network, or a virtual cross-connection through a connectivity provider at a co-location facility. ExpressRoute connections do not go over the public Internet. This allows ExpressRoute connections to offer more reliability, faster speeds, lower latencies, and higher security than typical connections over the Internet.
AWS Direct Connect is dedicated network connection from customer premises to AWS cloud. AWS Direct Connect establishes private connectivity between customer and AWS cloud services. Some of the benefits of Direct Connect vs Commodity Internet reduction in network costs increase bandwidth throughput and consistent network experience. With AWS Direct Connect, customer can choose the data that utilizes the dedicated connection and how that data is routed which can provide a more consistent network experience over Internet-based connections. AWS Direct Connect is a network service that provides an alternative to using the Internet to utilize AWS cloud services. Using AWS Direct Connect, data that would have previously been transported over the Internet can now be delivered through a private network connection between AWS and customer datacenter or network. All AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and Amazon DynamoDB can be used with AWS Direct Connect.