Express Connect allows you to establish a reliable, secure, and fast connection between your data center and a Virtual Private Cloud. You can use Express Connect to enable communication between networks with different architectures. The following section describes the scenarios where you can use Express Connect:
Scenario 1: Multi-zone disaster recovery and high-availability network architecture for large and medium-sized enterprises
You can establish multiple connections over Express Connect circuits between different access points and a VPC to ensure high availability for your business-critical services. This prevents service downtime caused by severed fiber cables, device malfunctions, or access point errors.
You can create dedicated connections or hosted connections in this scenario.
Scenario 2: High-elasticity and high-availability network architecture for large enterprises
In scenarios where business grows rapidly and your data center cannot meet the requirements for further development, you can deploy your workloads on the cloud. In addition, Express Connect supports equal-cost multi-path (ECMP) routing. You can configure ECMP to optimize bandwidth usage through multiple connections over Express Connect circuits and transfer network traffic at the Tbit/s level. This prevents service downtime caused by malfunctions of devices, leased lines, and access points.
You can create only dedicated connections in this scenario.
Scenario 3: Simplified network architecture for non-critical services
In scenarios that do not require high elasticity or high availability, Express Connect allows you to build a simplified network. For example, to run tests in a staging environment on Alibaba Cloud, we recommend that you use Express Connect to establish a private connection between your data center and Alibaba Cloud. This ensures the security and reliability of communication between your data center and Alibaba Cloud.
You can create dedicated connections or hosted connections in this scenario.
