Connecting your colocated hardware to AWS, Azure or GCP

Why colocate hardware and still want cloud connectivity

Colocating hardware and using public cloud aren't competing choices, they're often used together. A business might colocate equipment because of a specific compliance requirement, an existing hardware investment, or a workload that needs dedicated physical resources, while still running other parts of the same system in AWS, Azure or GCP. That's a hybrid cloud setup, and it only works well if the two environments can talk to each other directly.

The reasons to want a direct link rather than routing over the public internet:

• Data gravity: once a large dataset lives on your colocated hardware, moving it or querying it from cloud services is faster and cheaper over a direct connection than over the public internet.
• Lower egress cost: cross-environment traffic over the public internet is slower and, with most cloud providers, billed as egress. A direct link usually moves that traffic onto the cloud provider's lower interconnect data-transfer rate rather than removing the charge, so check the current rates with the cloud provider.
• Lower, more predictable latency: a direct connection removes the unpredictability of public internet routing between your colocated rack and the cloud provider's network.

What's available

Worldstream provides direct hybrid links from colocated hardware to:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Microsoft Azure
• Google Cloud
• An OpenStack environment

These links are direct rather than routed over the public internet.

Typical use cases

• Keeping a database or large dataset on colocated hardware for compliance or performance reasons, while running application and compute layers in public cloud.
• Bursting workloads into public cloud capacity while keeping the primary systems on colocated hardware.
• Migrating to cloud gradually, running colocated and cloud environments side by side during the transition.