Item | VPC peering connection | Transit router | PrivateLink | VPN gateway |
Connection methods | Full mesh, which allows VPCs to communicate with each other over VPC peering connections. | Hub-spoke, which allows VPCs to connect to transit routers over VPC connections. | Connection of business network elements. This resembles connections of devices in physical networks, such as load balancers and firewalls. | Connection between VPCs through VPN. |
Route advertisement | Unsupported | Supported | Unsupported | Supported |
Configuration complexity | The configuration is complex. You must create VPC peering connections and configure the routes that point to each VPC peering connection for peer VPCs. | The configuration is simple. You need to only connect VPCs to a transit router and configure settings to route the network traffic of VPCs to the transit router. | The configuration is simple. You do not need to consider address conflicts or route configurations. | The configuration is complex. You must create VPN gateways, customer gateways, and IPsec-VPN connections, and configure routes for the VPN gateways. |
Maximum number of connected VPCs | 10 | 1,000 | Unlimited. You can request a quota increase. | 10 |
Latency | Alibaba Cloud internal networks are used and the latency is low. | Alibaba Cloud internal networks are used and the latency is low. | Alibaba Cloud internal networks are used and the latency is low. PrivateLink supports only communication within the same region. | The Internet is used and the latency is high. |
Billing | You are not charged for VPC peering connections that are created for VPCs in the same region. If you create a VPC peering connection between VPCs that reside in different regions, you are charged for outbound traffic of the VPCs. The billing is managed by Cloud Data Transfer (CDT). For more information, see What is CDT? | For connections among VPCs in the same region, you are charged connection fees and traffic processing fees. For connections among VPCs in different regions, you are charged fees for bandwidth plans and data transfer fees. For more information about pay-by-data-transfer, see What is CDT? For more information, see Billing.
| You are not charged when you activate PrivateLink. After you activate PrivateLink, you are charged on a pay-as-you-go basis. Bills are generated on an hourly basis. You are charged an instance fee and data transfer fee. For more information, see Billing overview. | You are charged IPsec-VPN instance fees and data transfer fees. For more information, see Billing overview. |
Supported regions | Regions that support VPC peering connections | Regions that support transit routers | Regions and zones that support PrivateLink | Regions that support IPsec-VPN |