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Cloud CNI

Cloud Interconnect allows you to connect your virtual private cloud (VPC) virtual networks directly with Cloudflare – for a more reliable and secure experience.

Connecting to Cloudflare directly with a Cloud Interconnect reduces latency, makes your network more stable by bypassing Internet performance potential bottlenecks, and will often reduce your cloud provider network egress bandwidth charges.

The use case for Cloud Interconnect is Magic Transit or Magic WAN. If you have publicly routable origins that are behind Magic Transit over a Cloud Interconnect, then all Cloudflare services that work with public origins will run over the CNI (e.g. Load Balancer, WAF, Cache etc).

Supported cloud providers

Cloudflare supports interconnect with:

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect
  • Google Cloud (GCP) Interconnect
  • IBM Cloud Direct Link
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) FastConnect

Azure ExpressRoute support is coming soon.

Cloud Interconnect Setup

Enterprise customers using Magic WAN or Magic Transit can get started with Cloud Interconnect by contacting their account team.

AWS Direct Connect (beta)

If you are a Magic WAN customer, you can connect to AWS Direct Connect ↗ using Cloud Interconnect. Currently, Cloud Interconnect only supports Dedicated Direct Connect, not Hosted Direct Connect. A Dedicated AWS Direct Connect involves a full physical port allocation in AWS, whereas a Hosted AWS Direct Connect uses a VLAN on a shared port between AWS and Cloudflare.

For your AWS Direct Connect, you can choose between connection speeds of 10 Gbps or 1 Gbps.

To connect to AWS Direct Connect:

  1. Contact your account team to start the Cloud Interconnect provisioning process. Your team will let you know of available interconnect locations so you can choose the best one for you, as well as all the details involved in this process.
  2. Log in to your AWS portal and order a Direct Connect.
  3. AWS will provide you a Letter of Agency (LOA) — sometimes referred to as a Letter of Authorization — and a VLAN ID that you need to send to your account team.
  4. Your account team will continue the process of provisioning your Cloud Interconnect with the AWS documents you have provided. Overall, this process should take around four weeks to finish.