As a best practice, it is recommended to have at least two separate connections at two different DX locations. In this case, you end up with two DX connections. This will provide resiliency against connectivity failure due to a device failure, a network cable cut, or an entire location failure.
To achieve maximum resiliency, use at least two separate connections terminating on distinct devices in at least two DX locations attached to two different regions. In this case, you end up with at least four DX connections and are protected not just against a single device failure, a network cable cut, or an entire location failure, but also against an entire geography failure.
Either as an alternative to additional DX connections or as an additional resiliency protection measure, you can also create a VPN connection as a backup connectivity option.
Now that you know how to set up hybrid network infrastructure, you are ready to learn how to create a hybrid storage infrastructure between your on-premises locations and your AWS environment.
On top of the already mentioned reasons to opt for a DX connection, such as network bandwidth consistency and throughput, the cost is obviously an important aspect not to be ignored or discarded too quickly.
For occasional usage and low data volume transmission between your on-premises environment and AWS, in many cases, a VPN connection is good enough, and this is what organizations typically begin with when they start using AWS. After all, all organizations already have broadband internet access nowadays, so setting up a simple IPsec connection is usually straightforward. However, when additional requirements come in, such as improving network consistency and reliability or benefiting from a higher network throughput, organizations start looking into AWS DX.
And beyond technical requirements, the overall cost of the solution should also be estimated. For AWS Managed VPN, you pay for the number of hours the connection is active (which varies per AWS region) and for data (volume) that you transfer from AWS to your on-premises environments, also known as Data Transfer Out (DTO). For AWS DX, you pay a price per port hours a DX connection is up (which varies per AWS region and connection capacity) and for data (volume) that you transfer from AWS to your on-premises environments. Data sent into AWS bears no costs.
DTO costs for data sent over a VPN connection are the same as for data sent over the internet from your AWS environment and vary per AWS region. DTO costs for data sent over a DX connection vary per combination of AWS region and AWS DX location. The closer those two are to each other, the lower the DTO costs. For instance, DTO costs are lower when transferring data from any AWS region in Europe to any DX location in Europe than from any AWS region in Asia to any DX location in Europe (and vice versa, by the way). That said, DTO costs for traffic sent over DX are always lower than DTO costs for traffic sent over the internet (VPN or not), and sometimes even an order of magnitude lower.
Thus, besides mere technical requirements, in situations when large volumes of data (terabytes (TB) or beyond) need to be transferred from your AWS environments to your on-premises environment(s), it can become significantly more beneficial financially to leverage a DX connection.
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